Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Shorter links solutions

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

On 20 Sep 2005, at 20:58, Matthew McNaney wrote:

> Hello,
>
> After talking with a few people privately (since no one responded here
> *ahem*) I have decided the following.
>
> 1) We will go with solution 2 for mod_rewrite.
>
> 2) I spoke with Kenneth, who suggested some defaults behavior to  
> reduce
> link size. For example, in web page, if it just receives an id  
> variable,
> it will assume that the user just wants to view that web page. This
> removes a 'user_option=view' addition to the link.
>


Good call.

I think it would be a good idea if we had more modules default to  
'view' behaviour if no action is given. Or to default to a list view  
of all available items.

For instance,

http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/index.php?module=announce and http:// 
phpwebsite.appstate.edu/index.php?module=faq just give a title and no  
content. It would be more sensible to go to say the category view or  
an archive view rather than presenting the user with nothing.

Then when we have short urls http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/announce/  
or http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/faq/ would be useful.




> 3) Brian came up with an idea for a module I am calling 'Shortcut'.
> Basically when enabled, you just go to the page, file, article,  
> etc. you
> want to create the shortcut for and click and add button. Shortcut  
> asks
> you what you want the shortcut to be named. Then you can just call the
> item via the shortcut like so:
>
> http://phpwebsite.com/index.php?module=shortcut&go=my_favorite_pony
>
> OR if you have mod_rewrite enabled, a much shorter version:
>
> http://phpwebsite.com/my_favorite_pony
>
> I have seen sites use this before so it may not be a 'new' idea but
> anyway...
>

Drupal have a very nice implementation of this which they call an  
'alias'. Any content node can be given an alias and referred to  
throughout Drupal when you create it. It doesn't use mod_rewrite  
entirely though, it goes through a module to convert links from their  
shortcuts. They also have a module which automatically gives nodes a  
short url based on the title of the node. eg. the title of an  
announcement should you not bother to supply one.

Both work best if you can tell modules such as menuman, pagemaster,  
fatcat etc to use the short url in the urls presented to both admins  
and users. Otherwise people will still be pasting in long urls into  
forums and announcements to refer to other parts of the site. Those  
long urls cause havoc with fixed size CSS based themes where you may  
only have 4-500 pixels for the forum.


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