Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Link simplification proposal

[Shaun M. <sh...@ae...>]

On 3 Nov 2004, at 15:35, Matthew McNaney wrote:

> I like the concept but with a few notes:
>
> 1) Mod_rewrite in 0.9.4/1.0.0 solves the long link string pretty well.
> This may not be needed then.

This presumes people have mod_rewrite installed which some hosting  
plans don't allow as it can be expensive on cpu time and of course it  
only works on Apache. Some users use .htaccess ForceType rules instead  
with no file extensions used and a bit of PHP so...

http://www.domain.com/pagemaster.php?id=4 becomes  
http://www.domain.com/pagemaster/id/4/ making the url more search  
engine friendly if not exactly shorter.

See  
http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/php-alternative-to-mod-rewrite-for-se- 
friendly-urls for an example



>
> 2) I don't believe it should be a 'standard'. I think it should be
> implemented as a shortcut. Having two versions of link creation may be
> confusing.

I don't think it would be that big a deal in practice for a user. The  
old links would still work and any mod using the new shorter url would  
just start using both.

>
> 3) Creating the file on installation may be problematic as we normally
> only give write access to files, images, etc. If the file is not  
> created
> on install, the admin will have to create it themselves.
>
> I think having a shortcut for people to link to pages and such would be
> cool but I would like to see it as as an added feature that doesn't
> require rewrites or a change in the current system.
>

Couldn't we just do this with a minor change in index.php?

Add a stub in each module to encode / decode short urls and change each  
module as we go to call the functions to convert long urls to short  
ones. This is how it was done in Xaraya IIRC and each stub was almost  
identical unless the module did something crazy. Maybe there's some  
method of registering the stubs with the index needed also but nothing  
boost couldn't do I'd guess.

We could then even lose the index.php with a really simple mod_rewrite  
or forcetype rule rather than some massive list.


Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk