Most content management systems, whether they are real CMS or blogs or event e-commerece site (eg, Magento) allow some sort of “smart url” system for pages, which is in fact a twofold process:
- Create and display the smart url of each page
- When someone comes to the server with a smart url, deliver the expected content Of course these 2 points are interdependent.
Item 2 is usually achieved by combining some url-rewrite magic to the cms
Item 1 is usually selected out of several options, the most common ones being post number: this is usually the default page address, just numbers. It is a safe way, because this will work in most situations, even if url rewrite fails. If possible, it is wise to select post number + keyword combination, you can just anticipate some fall back mechanism in case the keywords have changed automatic url regeneration: this is a trap, and Drupal is very “good” at it: if you change some words in the title of he page, then the smart URL is changed and it means that all bookmarks to the previous address will fail (except of course if you have a fallback mechanism as hinted above). Best compromise, if possible, is to have some way to change/ edit the url generated and to protect it from change (Very easy with SPIP if you have the right add-on) (not that common) list of “noisy words” that should be dropped from URLs: if your program has this option, then you can be almost sure to throw away almost all “noise” (Drupal has this) minimum length of a word used in a smart url: my preference is to throw away words of 1 or 2 letters, and keeping 3 or more; there are lots of “noisy” 3 letters words… but there are also lots of significant , so this is my preference… but note that if you have the “list of noisy words” option you can probably take that to 2 letters instead of 3 separator: usual options are minus/dash “-”, underscore “_” or comma”,”. My own preference: keep as far away as possible from comma (but programs like SPIP use it), and I have a long lasting preference for minus/dash maximum length of the generated URL: you can usually select the max number of words in the smart URL and/ or the max number of chars: note that you will then need a mechanism to make distinct URLs for pages with the same main words in the title
how to handle special or accented characters and punctuation: this is a common trap if your writing language is not English, because all these SEO experts and themselves says they are SEO Professional with English as a mother tongue do not even think this might be a problem, and so thay have put in place regular expressions which throw away everything which is not in the a-z A-Z 0-9 space… and so all the accented characters are simply dropped. So you need to work with your own function that will convert accented chars to their non-accented char, ie all being translated to e. Blogspot/ blogger is the “best” example of such a poor design, where designers have thought and built in a purely US-centric way, assuming that problems that foreign people would face with accented characters are insignificant… for my own blogs on blogspot I have used the strategy of creating the initial post with non-accented chars, then when the smart-url has been generated I often place back the correct accented chars. Works fine with blogger / blogspot since URLs are not recalculated (see item 2 above), would not work otherwise
What is your own experience on this? how do you manage? which poblems have you met?
