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Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo

Clean URL's


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22 Posts   25920 Views

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Sam

Administrator, 690 Posts

9 May 2008 at 10:55am

I hear what you're saying, Daniel. However, I should also point out that we've built 100s of website for our clients with SilverStripe, and this issue has been rarely mentioned, and has certainly never been a show-stopper.

All of the documents listing the benefts of clean URLs don't apply here, because we have clean URLs; the thing that we're missing is hierarchical URLs for CMS page.

But I'm not going to argue about the benefits of them with you. It's irrelevant until there's a developer available who has the time to do the development work.

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Fuzz10

Community Member, 791 Posts

9 May 2008 at 6:44pm

Edited: 09/05/2008 7:01pm

In my view, changing the URL generator so it creates hierarchical URL's by using dashes is a perfect temporary fix. Sure, it is not as user friendly as `slash` separated URL´s , but it will surely help with Google.

Maybe the url generator should have this as an option (configurable through the config file)....

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Liam

Community Member, 470 Posts

9 May 2008 at 6:55pm

I would agree. If we're not going to get the true hierarchy URLs with sub sections, this would be a better fix and doesn't seem to require a lot of work.

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Sigurd

Forum Moderator, 628 Posts

13 May 2008 at 10:27am

Just to be clear, supporting Hierachical URLs is something we want to do.

It's purely a case of it being a complex task that requires either
a) a kind and progressive commercial client to fund it for open source release,
b) donations so that we can pay our core developers to do it
c) or a competent PHP5/SilverStripe programmer to donate time to work with the core development team.

In my work on silverstripe.com I find myself wishing for the feature, and I would state the first goal is to allow URLs the below to be unique and logically representing their position within a sitemap.

So, taking the previous example...
/office
-----/stockholm
----------/staff
----------/contact
----------/events
-----/gothenburg
----------/staff
----------/contact
----------/events

The idea is to allow the two 'staff' pages to not default to "staff" and "staff-2", but to contain "office" and "stockholm/gothenburg" in the URLs.

Whether the deliminator is a hyphen or a slash depends on the level of time/money we get, with slashes being seen is the ideal, but more difficult, goal.

If someone was keen to help out let us now ... I'm sigurd@silverstripe.com

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Sam

Administrator, 690 Posts

13 May 2008 at 11:39am

I've put together a summary of the development issues here, should anyone want to have a go at building this: http://open.silverstripe.com/ticket/2508

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Bruce B

Community Member, 164 Posts

16 May 2008 at 11:25am

My current day job is webmaster for a government department. Consequently, I end up with a lot of end-user phone calls. My feeling is that hierarchical URLs are simply not an issue for 99% of end-users. In fact, we have a lot of people who know nothing about the address line in the browser - give them a URL and they'll type it into google.

I certainly see errors where more knowledgeable people have knocked off the end of a URL only to find that particular directory has no index page. But they seem to be a small minority.

I'd be happy with hierarchical menus with dashes but it implies a more sophisticated user than the current setup requires. Page URL segments will need to be separately entered rather than derived from the page title.

cheers
bruce

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Liam

Community Member, 470 Posts

16 May 2008 at 12:36pm

The main benefit would be for a SEO advantage, as well as the minor things listed in this topic. Like duplicate, more meaningful URL sections for that matter.

Having more keywords in the URL would be key, and I don't mean just tacking them on to the page URL.

Really basic idea would be for tutorials.

domain.com/tutorials/photoshop/some-name
domain.com/tutorials/dreamweaver/some-name

and so forth. A structure like this will rank your site much higher when a user searches for "some photoshop tutorial" and not only that, a search engine will better understand your content when grouped like this.

I agree most users won't type things in directly, but the odd ones will. Using my example above, people who are familiar with your site and visit it often, would possibly type a direct URL to access a specific section they're looking for.

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FrostySonic

Community Member, 6 Posts

27 June 2008 at 2:35pm

As a new user of silverstripe i though i'd weigh in on this.

I was extremely surprised that there is no functionality for hierarchical URLs. They are very much a standard for websites, blogs, CMSs and web URL naming conventions in general. I won't repeat the practical reasons for them already well explained.

That said, i don't think that the 'normal' end users care, but most IT-oriented people actually do.

Without having to go through and re-do the base code, isn't an easier way of implementing this to actually just use some fancy URL rewriting using Apache's mod_rewrite or something similar that Silverstripe could maintain itself? This would enable the better URLS, but all Silverstripe would have to do is update a .htaccess file?

I am a bit ignorant on the way Silverstripe is coded, so I don't know if this is a viable, if temporary, solution.