SEO URLs

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sooskriszta
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by sooskriszta »

Seems like a pretty good alternative!
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by Oleg »

The question is, is there a single alternative that will satisfy everyone who wants SEO urls?

Keep in mind the two things that are required for something to be included in phpbb:

1. A working implementation (patch).
2. Consensus among phpbb developers that the feature should be included.

If there does not exist an implementation, the feature will not be included. If every board admin potentially requires a different url generation approach, the implementation would necessarily be complicated and may be rejected on the grounds of excessive complexity.

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sooskriszta
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by sooskriszta »

I can't think of good reasons why admins would want variations of the SEO URLs if the default version is good - your suggestion seemed great, and one that SHOULD satisfy most.

But how can we go about finding whether this is just me speculating or whether one implementation can actually please pretty much everyone? Should I start a thread in phpBB board?
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DavidIQ
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by DavidIQ »

nn- wrote:The issue of htaccess files should also be moot - for servers other than apache instructions may be provided how to achieve equivalent results, sample configuration files, or both. For example, there is now a sample configuration file for running phpbb with nginx.
For IIS7 you can import the .htaccess file into the URLRewriting module. But none of this makes it a matter of flipping a switch either although that's not really too much of a problem I suppose.
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by Oleg »

sooskriszta wrote: But how can we go about finding whether this is just me speculating or whether one implementation can actually please pretty much everyone? Should I start a thread in phpBB board?
Yes. I would suggest specifically stating that the thread would be only for discussing what the URLs should look like for a core SEO url implementation, to keep it on topic. "phpbb discussion" sounds like a better place for it since it really is more about board admins than modification writers.

Edit: perhaps it would be a good idea to bring up other relevant questions that would need to be decided as well:

1. What happens to the URLs when topics get split or merged?
2. What happens to URLs when topic title is edited?

... and any other issues that I am overlooking now.

Essentially, the thread would be about obtaining consensus from those that want SEO URLs about how they should behave.

I wonder also how many phpbb boards have some form of SEO URL mod installed.

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Re: SEO URLs

Post by DavidIQ »

nn- wrote:I wonder also how many phpbb boards have some form of SEO URL mod installed.
http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1
Take a look around at the behavior. The SEO MOD there is called phpBB SEO and was a bit of a pain to set up. It was fairly easy to bring down the server with some of the .htaccess recommendations the MOD gave...
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by AdamR »

DavidIQ wrote:For IIS7 you can import the .htaccess file into the URLRewriting module. But none of this makes it a matter of flipping a switch either although that's not really too much of a problem I suppose.
phpBB is already including a web.config file in the package, so IIS7 is taken care of. Either preset configuration in .htaccess/web.config/whatever or having the option to write to the configuration file (similar to how Wordpress handles this) would be the best solution, IMO.

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jsebean
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by jsebean »

nn- wrote: 1. What happens to the URLs when topics get split or merged?
2. What happens to URLs when topic title is edited?
How do other Boards (like IPB) handle this?
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sooskriszta
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by sooskriszta »

nn- wrote:
sooskriszta wrote: But how can we go about finding whether this is just me speculating or whether one implementation can actually please pretty much everyone? Should I start a thread in phpBB board?
Yes. I would suggest specifically stating that the thread would be only for discussing what the URLs should look like for a core SEO url implementation, to keep it on topic. "phpbb discussion" sounds like a better place for it since it really is more about board admins than modification writers.
Started a topic here: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2117269
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Re: SEO URLs

Post by Sam »

I believe a simple solution could be implemented that would allow users to change topic titles without breaking the links. (looking back more closely at this thread, it resembles nn-'s suggestion).

/phpbb3/ <- Board index
/phpbb3/general-discussion-12/ <- General Discussion forum (id of 12)
/phpbb3/general-discussion-12/fighting-spam-472/ <- The topic Fighting Spam (id 472) in the general discussion.

The ID would still be in the URL which it would use as it will not rely on the text of the URL to find the topic. Instead, you could put anything in /phpbb3/fake-forum-12/ (when forum 12 is General Discussion) and upon visiting this, it will check to see if the forum is really General discussion and redirect the user with a 301 to the appropriate URL. It would store the URL slug ("general-discussion", in this case) in the database and compare it to the one it sees in the URL instead of going through the process to create a slug for comparison on every view (which could be resource intensive). This would be applied to topics as well, which means you could effectively change the URL and not loose any bookmarks.

It might also make sense to include a new permission in allowing people to change topic titles. Even though we have the protection of keeping links active, there is a good chance there could be some administrators that may want such a restriction when URLs are involved.

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