I'm rebuilding/redesigning a site in Rails that's currently in production using Magento. To ensure that I don't lower my seo rankings I am keeping my URI's the same. I am facing an optimization issue with this because the current site doesn't have subdirectories. With that said, the products are under the root directory of the site, the reviews are under the root directory of the site, and all the other content pages are under the root directory of the site.
for example a product might be at
www.example.com/some-product-name
and a review could be at
www.example.com/some-review-name
rails obviously uses routes and my first guess was to make a route that looks like this:
get '/:uri_identifier', to: 'pages#find_page'
This works fine, but with 50k products to query through and 5k reviews along with another 200 different content pages, this creates an optimization issue since this controller method becomes a catch all to figure out which page it should render based on
params[:uri_identifier]
The uri's don't have any kind of form either so filtering them with an if statement to avoid large amounts of queries isn't really feasible. My idea was to create routes specific for the reviews and add them in routes.erb above the route
get '/:uri_identifier', to: 'pages#find_page'
but I'm still going to have to create close to 5k routes to pull this off. I did try this and it worked, but I'm not real sure what is the best way to approach this issue to ensure that I use the least amount of resources.
There are several patterns for solving this kind of problems in rails. One of which is slug constraint. Use this resources they help with the concept of using slugs and refactoring large rails routes
http://blog.arkency.com/2014/01/short-urls-for-every-route-in-your-rails-app/
http://code-worrier.com/blog/custom-slugs-in-rails/
Refactoring a large routes.rb file in rails 4
I'm building a rails3 application and at the moment I have the following line in my routes.rb file:
get "/:id" => 'tapes#show'
In other words, you can show a Tape using website.com/tapes/1 and also by using website.com/1
(I am also using friendly_id gem so the user sees in fact a friendly URL in the form of website.com/tapename)
Now, what I would like to achieve is to do the same thing for Users pages. So instead of showing a User page using website.com/users/alex I want to be able to also use website.com/alex.
Is there a way to implement this 'users' logic in routes.rb together with the existing 'tapes' rule and somehow set a priority?
So if someone accesses website.com/alex my app would search if there is a User record with id 'alex' and if none is found then look for a Tape with id 'alex'.
Could I use some kind of Advanced Constraints in routes?
Any ideas?
Many thanks for the help,
Alex
Rails would have no way to determine which controller you were trying to access. The only way that this would be possible, is if either:
you could determine which model it would resolve to based upon some regular expression on the name.
or
You knew that user names and tape names never conflicted, and were willing to suffer the cost of hitting the database to resolve the correct controller.
This is probably a bad idea for a number of reasons, it would have performance implications, it also doesn't conform to RESTful principles, and it would probably be confusing to users.
I'm wondering how the snowman affects the SEO.
For example, if someone puts a link to your post with the snowman, it means two URLs are pointing to the same resource (the other one without snowman), and basically this is bad for search engines.
Does this really poses a problem?
If you care about SEO you should already have 303 redirects for normalization in place, so that both the URL with and without the snowmen end up linking to the same URL, hopefully without any query parameter.
Also, this only affect forms that use the GET method; URLs that can only be retrieved via POST request are not crawled at all.
Minor note: the snowman is no longer used in current Rails versions, now you have utf8=✓.
My freelance web developer is developing a site on Ruby on Rails. Currently the URL structure is
http://abc.com/all?ID=category
Example:
http://abc.com/all?3=CatA
I requested him to structure the URL according to categories, such as
http://abc.com/CatA/3-page-title
but he refused cos it was too much work and cost involved as he is using the same model for Category A, Category B... I thought the URL structure that he is using is messy and not search engine friendly.
My question is, should I add cost to let him do a better structured URL I requested, or should I let the project finish, then do it in the next iteration?
I'm worried that if I do it in the next iteration, all the previous URLs structured in the old way will be purged and when sites that refer to it will show a 404 error. It's like I have to rebuild the site ranking all over again.
Any other solutions for me? Is that any way to redirect old URLs to new URLs automatically in Rails?
The way your developer is proposing to compose the URLs would be considered something of an anti-pattern is Rails. What you are looking for is close to what Rails does out-of-the-box when using RESTful resource routing, admittedly, I'm guessing as to how CatA and page-title are related to each other. A RESTful Rails route might look like this (using your example):
http://abc.com/categories/3-CatA/pages/10-page-tite
If he really is using Rails, and he knows what he's doing, then there should be no cost at all to converting to what you want. It just needs the correct routes defined and then a to_param override in your models to get the nice SEO friendly identifiers.
My question here is seeking best practice, general advice and insight, rather than a solution to a specific problem.
I am in the early stages of planning out a Rails project which I consider fairly large. At its simplest level it offers a cookie-cutter CMS to the target users. So users sign up and choose a subdomain and are given a pretty basic website with CMS.
Therefore the entire app has about 4 different 'sides' to it:
A sales website selling the product to end users - www.myapp.com
A central admin area where staff can log in and manage accounts etc - www.myapp.com/superadmin
The users' own websites - subdomain.myapp.com
The users' admin area/CMS - subdomain.myapp.com/admin
So really what I'm looking for is best practice for structuring the app. i.e. should it all be rolled into one huge application or should it be split over 2 (or more) smaller apps?
If deployed as one application, I can see issues surrounding routing as both the sales website and the users' websites will need a root path set, plus I would not want the routes I set for the sales website being accessible through the users' websites. Can anything be done either within Rails or at Apache level (mod rewrites ?) to ensure no mixup of routes?
If split over 2 or more applications, how do you get the applications sharing the same database? Is that even a good idea? Are there any benefits from splitting the application (like isolating problems in one area of the app, rather than bringing everything down)?
I realise this post raises quite a few different questions, but appreciate any advice and insight you can give me.
I believe the benefits of isolating your concerns into separate apps outweigh the costs. I would probably start off with just 2 apps (one for the main site and superadmin, one for the client sites and admins), accessing the same database, but you could do 4.
The downside is you don't really have isolation since all your apps are tied to one database. You will eventually run into scaling problems with your database, but starting off simple with one database will get you launched. One strategy for scaling later would be to add a slave db that the client site and main site apps use, while the admin apps use the master db. This along with a TON of caching will get you pretty far.
There is nothing wrong with having multiple rails apps access one db, however you will need a way to share common code across your apps. Your models for the most part. I've done this before by tossing all my models in a plugin that I share as a sub-module in git or as an external in svn. Having separate apps will make each app smaller and easier to maintain.
However, where do you keep your migrations? Where do you test your models? I would opt for the superadmin app. Also, you make a change to a model or the schema, and now you have to check 2-4 apps and make sure they still work!
Better isolation, separate db's and inter-app communication through web APIs (SOA) and you don't have to worry about that. SOA I think is the way to go after a certain point, but SOA might be premature when you first start out.
At any rate, having separate apps sets you up for SOA but you don't have to jump beyond a single db to start.
I would bundle this all into the same app because you won't be duplicating the classes (models, plugins, etc.) across all the apps. Also: running 4 apps means that you'll have 4 processes all consuming memory due to the 4 separate Rails stacks they have loaded.
Compiling it into one application eliminates this issue. For the issue between the sales site and the users site having to have different roots that can be solved, as mentioned earlier, by subdomain_fu. Let me expand with some sample code from an application I have:
map.with_options :conditions => {:subdomain => 'logs'} do |admin|
admin.resources :channels do |channel|
channel.resources :logs
end
map.root :channels
map.connect ':id', :controller => "channels", :action => "show"
end
As we see here, the :conditions for the with_options method sets :subdomain to be logs which means that anything coming in to logs.mysite.com will fufill these conditions and therefore be routed this way.
Now further on in this routing file I have everything else wrapped up in a similar block:
map.with_options :conditions => {:subdomain => nil} do |admin|
# shebang!
end
Everything going to mysite.com will go to these routes.
Lastly, compiling it all into one mega-super-hyper-app will eliminate the database-sharing issues.
The biggest issue I see with separating into several apps is that you lose flexibility. What happens if, in the future, a previously administrative task (eg. uploading a type of file) becomes a "user task"? You would have to be moving code from one application to the other.
I'd keep everything on single application - and use roles for filtering what each user can see and do. It might be a bit more difficult at the begining, but it pays up in the near future.
Have a look at authorization frameworks, such as declarative_authorization or cancan.
Well, since nobody else has spoken up, I'd encourage you to do some reading on Service-Oriented Architecture. The book Enterprise Rails by Dan Chak has some great material on this, and you can read a lot of it through Google Books. Try chapter 13, here. I think it'll put you on the right track.
I see the kind of problem you are facing is, trying to build an application which will have various sub domains, so account_manager a plugin can solve your problem.
also if your application is large enough to maintain than splitting them in two or three would be good idea, with restfull resources you can make your applications talk to each other and so.
while if you are thinking of having them under one database, thats quite simple in rails using the establish_connection.
I think you can split the application in three to four different applications where set of clusters will handle each applications request, so the speed will be good. also you can bundle similar kind of functionality in one app to make sure maintaining them is easy.
http://www.railslodge.com/plugins/1113-subdomain-fu
As far as my research has taken me, most companies at high scale would opt for SOA with multiple databases. Here are links to some information on how Linked In and EBay think about this. And to echo PreciousBodilyFluids, I highly recommend the Enterprise Rails book by Dan Chak.