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Urls, why no 'sublevel' urls?


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51 Posts   36625 Views

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Sam

Administrator, 690 Posts

8 August 2007 at 12:46pm

There a further complexities with this kind of linking system:

* Link insertion / editing
* Broken link detection
* Auto-update links when you rename a page

In short, despite it being a commonly requested feature, I really don't think this is going to be part of the core any time soon.

I'm going to be reviewing some of the extension APIs in the near future, and I'll look at ways that we could allow for this feature as an add-on module, rather than part of the core. Then users can judge for themselves whether it's worth using such a system and putting up with minor feature-breaks.

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owaincastor

2 Posts

10 September 2007 at 9:37pm

I too am in favour of sub-level URLs and hope this essential feature makes it into a future SilverStripe release.

@elijahlofgren: The advantages you give for not having sub-level URLs don't seem to me to be all that valid. Short URLs are useful, but shouldn't take the place of a meaningful URL that indicates to the user their current position within the information architecture of the site. For example, a user landing at, say, 'www.topfilmsite.com/features/interviews/hitchcock' would likely infer from the URL that they're viewing a page about an interview with Hitchcock and that the interviews section resides within the features super-section. Furthermore, by simply lopping off portions of the URL the user could easily discover more related content. Cut off 'hitchcock' and the user could reasonably expect to view interviews with other directors or actors. Cut off 'interviews/hitchcock' and the user could perhaps find other filmic treasures.This is all without the user clicking one element of in-page navigation. Try doing that with the more spartan ''www.topfilmsite.com/hitchcock'. Where this short format *is* useful, is quoting URLs in print. All the savvy web admin need do is simply create a shortcut in the Apache config using the 'Redirect' directive, thusly: 'Redirect /hitchcock http://www.topfilmsite.com/features/interviews/hitchcock' and pass the shortcut to the print people in the magazine department.

A certain JN has covered this topic more fully elsewhere: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html

As for maintaining a stable site when rearranging pages, how about creating some key or index and then mapping pages to this key. Internal site links could point at the key, rather than the actual page, so when objects move the links always remain valid. I know one such CMS that uses this method to good effect.

Thanks and keep up the good work. SilverStripe is an excellent piece of software.

- OC

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Sycophant

1 Post

20 September 2007 at 11:07pm

This is a feature I find *really* desirable.

The main reason is it allows for easy classification and grouping.

I'm not yet very familiar with Silverstripe, but essentially the way I'd envisage something like this is that when you create a 'page' in the admin you also create a 'route' to it. By default that would be /category/sub-category/title - So in creating this forum the route would be set to, by default, /forums/feature-requests

In handling requests, you look for defined routes, which will direct the request to the relevant controller/action.

You can implement a system to reserve certain words perhaps? So setting up a subforum called 'Reply' or 'View' would not interfere with the actions for this forum. Instead they would have a forced prefix perhaps, or suffix.

Again, I'm not that familiar with SilverStripe specifically, but this seems like it should be a workable - and backward compatible - addition. Where no routes is defined for a request, it would fall back to default behaviour.

Another benefit of something like that would be the ability to have multiple URLs serving the same objects by simply declaring additional routes.

It really is a feature I think should not be overlooked. Even in designing static website I always use directory naming to provide logical grouping to URLs. If I have a hierarchical menu structure, I will aim to have URLs that reflect that structure.

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jam13

121 Posts

26 September 2007 at 10:43pm

Edited: 27/09/2007 1:52am

Hierarchical URLs are a must have feature for large sites IMHO. Trying to setup and maintain SEO friendly URLs for a 500 page site where a lot of the leaf pages have the same titles is a real pain:

/category1/name1
/category1/name2
/category2/name1
/category2/name2

I know you can use URLs like "category1-name1", but this has two flaws:

1) It's currently a manual process and so prone to errors
2) It's not "semantically" correct. Hyphens normally signify spaces whilst slashes signify groups of related things. For example a URL like /category1/name1 implies that there is a /category1 URL (which is normally true in a well designed site) and it is related to /category1/name2, whilst with /category1-name1 you cannot infer this.

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Fuzz10

Community Member, 791 Posts

20 November 2007 at 11:16pm

I think this could become a major issue when implementing large sites. Especially since it's becoming standard practice for clients to hire a specialized SEO company for advice. I know that they're not always right since it's not hard science. But one thing we'll get burned on with Silverstripe is the lack of hierarchical URLs.

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Sam

Administrator, 690 Posts

21 November 2007 at 11:29am

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fws

Community Member, 3 Posts

8 February 2008 at 4:15am

Did anything else ever come of this ?

I found silverstripe just a few days ago and untill i spotted this I was very keen to start using it. As it has been mentioned once a site grows this can become a real issue.

I also agree that when viewing a site I like to see clear definition of the area im in

eg

blog/this-post.html
forum/category/this-post.html

or even

blog-this-post.html
forum-sub-forum-this-post.html

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TobiasK

Community Member, 1 Post

8 April 2008 at 7:49pm

Hi,

I'm new to SilverStripe and just making first experiments. My goal is to shift the websites I'm managing for my customers and mine to SilverStripe. It looks great and promising, but the biggest headache is the missing sub-url feature. Currently, I'm using my selfwritten cms that does the following approach:

If a page /page/subpage/ exists, display this page.
If a page /page/subpage/ does not exists, but the /page/ can handle subpages itself, let it handle the subpage request.
If the request has not been performed, return 404.

Might this be a (quick) solution for the problem? I don't know the details, but this worked perfect for me.

Do you know, when there will be a solution for this feature request?

Best regards,
Tobias