Thread

But since it might be silly, it’s why I put it in the lounge. <grin>

I’m in the midst of a redesign of a large content site built on EE2. Content site in the sense that it is primarily a lot of articles about a complicated topic. URLs currently are of a standard form, something like this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/index.php/site/category1/article-name">http://www.domain.com/index.php/site/category1/article-name</a>

To accomplish the redesign, I’ve started a new template group (to eventually replace the template group called “site”). I’ve named that template group “v2”.

When we relaunch the site, I would like to remove index.php from the urls, but I read in the wiki that it’s not advised to remove the name of the template group - which would be my preference from an SEO standpoint - so that urls would be something like this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/category1/article-name">http://www.domain.com/category1/article-name</a>

I was thinking about this a little bit today and had a brainstorm (which might be brilliant or might be the result of something I ate last night that is disagreeing with me and driving me a bit batty). What if I named the new template group something like “read-about” so that the urls would look like this:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/read-about/category1/article-name">http://www.domain.com/read-about/category1/article-name</a>

Is that silly (or useless)?

Thanks,
Frank

Hey Frank - how are you?

There’s also 404 management to consider. Turning on strict urls is one of the basic steps in good 404 management for EE, and it enforces the template group names (which means you need one in there).

Is there no other word that would add semantic meaning vs. the ‘read-about’?  Is the site always and forever going to be about one topic such that you’d not want a secondary level term in there?

As Boyink! states, there are good reasons for using the template group as part of your url, but if you really want to remove it, and you can run the entire site through your index template, you could use something like Low’s Seg2Cat plugin to get the category ID and the {segment_2} variable to get the url_title parameter for your entries tag and just bypass the default url structure.

As someone who’s regularly spent quite a lot of time naming the index.php, template groups, category and tag keywords, and various templates so that they’ll all form interesting / thematic phrases that go with the site’s branding…nope, not silly at all. Not only can they provide ppl some context, but sometimes they’re like an Easter Egg to site visitors.

Sillier things have been done.

Mike, aircrash, and Lesli - thanks for the responses!

Lesli - I’d be interested in seeing examples of what you’ve done - just to spark my thinking.

Mike - I’m doing well. Working hard on this project - which is the site that’s being redesigned. So, as you can see, it’s all about insurance and will never talk about anything else in any depth.

I’m struggling to think of a different word which would add semantic meaning, but it’s probably just my feeble brain. 😊

Thanks again,

Frank

You always get the sexiest projects…:cheese:

You always get the sexiest projects…:cheese:

Ha! Hopefully, it will be very sexy at the end of the day. 😊 But not yet.

Frank