How can i realize seo friendly urls?
Instead
http://mysite.com/articles/show/2
i would like to use the articlename instead the id
i.e.
mysite.com/articles/show/articlename
or somehow combine id and articlename like this
mysite.com/articles/show/articlename-2
i'm a rails newbie so perhaps you could give me short advice where to change
something with what code?
Look in your article controller, probably in app/controllers/articles.rb. You probably have a method named show which looks up an article by id with something like this:
#article = Article.find(params[:id])
If you know the id is going to be the title of the post instead of its id, you can instead look up your article using
#article = Article.find_by_title(params[:id])
This will allow you to use somewhat ugly URLs like /articles/show/This+is+the+title. If you want to make a slightly nicer URL, you could add a column to your article table (called, say, seo_title) to store the title translated to lowercase with underscores, yielding something like this_is_the_title.
#and
Your question is at once both simple and yet difficult. Best you check out this more mature Stack Overflow post to find your answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/723765/how-do-i-make-the-urls-in-ruby-on-rails-seo-friendly-knowing-a-vendor-name/
It has more examples and more options. While find_by_title is an option, it is far from your best option.
Related
What is the best way to structure a route for comparing multiple items?
Here's the URL example: https://versus.com/en/microsoft-teams-vs-slack-vs-somalia
How to achieve this in routes.rb file? Cannot really find anything in Internet regarding ruby gems. The only thing I can think about is url with optional params, however what if the number of params is unlimited?
you're going to have to parse the a-vs-b-vs-c yourself.
So in routes.rb, you'll have something like:
get 'compare/:compare_string', to 'compare#show'
then you'll get a parameter compare_string that you'll have to parse:
#in compare_controller.rb
def show
compare_items = params[:compare_string].split('-vs-')
# generate the comparison from the compare_items array
end
First - you probably shouldn't allow unlimited #'s of parameters in practice. Even something like 100 might break your page and/or cause performance issues and open you up to DOS attacks. I'd choose some kind of sensible/practical limit and document/enforce it (like 10, 12 or whatever makes sense for your application). At around 2k characters you'll start running into URL-length issues.
Next - is there any flexibility in the URL? Names tend to change so if you want URL's to work over time you'll need to slug-ify each of them (with something like friendly-id) so you can track changes over time. For example - could you use an immutable/unique ID AND human-readable names?
In any case, Rails provides a very flexible system for URL routing. You can read more about the various options / configurations with their Rails routing documentation.
By default a Dynamic Segment supports text like in your example, so (depending on your controller name) you can do something like:
get 'en/:items', to: 'items#compare'
If it's helpful you can add a custom constraint regexp to guarantee that the parameter looks like what you expect (e.g. word-with-dashes-vs-another-vs-something-else)
get 'en/:items', to: 'items#compare', constraints: { items: /(?:(?:[A-Z-]+)vs)+(?:[A-Z-]+)/ }
Then, in your controller, you can parse out the separate strings however you want. Something like...
def compare
items = params[:items].split('-vs-')
end
I want to create param /users/will-smith, so here's my code:
def to_param
"#{full_name.parameterize}"
end
Parameterize will convert "Will Smith" to "will-smith"
So in the controller, the param won't match the find statement, thus return nil
# User with full_name "will-smith" not found
#user = User.find_by_full_name(params[:id])
Most of the solutions I found is by changing the param to #{id}-#{full_name.parameterize}. But I don't want the URL to contain the ID.
The other solutions is adding permalink column in the database, which I don't really like.
Any other solution?
Thanks
Here's a gem called FriendlyId. It will give you more options to play with.
The problem with your code is that you need to convert that parameter back to original, or use the same kind of transformation on your column during the search. FriendlyId, basically, helps you to achieve the same effect.
Also, I'm not sure, but you could miss that gist. It contaits lots of info on the topic.
I got a little problem using the LIKE sentence on rails i know that this next sentence works:
Brand.find(:all, :joins=>[:cars], :conditions=>["brandname LIKE ?","%ford%"])
But it's any way around that I could to something like this:
Brand.find(:all, :joins=>[:cars], :conditions=>["brandname LIKE '%ford%'"])
Its because i already have a function that returns all conditions on a single string, but i require to support search in strings and i don't really how to get it work.
Any help will be appreciated.
I'm not entirely certain that I understand what you're talking about. Are you trying to pass in a variable into the conditions?
I would re-write this query just a tad.
Brand.all.joins(:cars).where("brandname LIKE ?", "%#{some_variable}%")
Of course selecting all can be bad for performance if you get a lot of records so you may want to consider limiting that or paginating the results somehow.
I would recommend the guides. Using an array would be great in this instance
Brand.all.joins(:cars).where("brandname LIKE ?", "%#{params[:brand_search]}%")
I want to give my pages human-readable slugs, but Rails' built-in parameterize method isn't SEO-optimized. For example, if I have a post called "Notorious B.I.G. is the best", parameterize will give me this path:
/posts/notorious-b-i-g-is-the-best
which is suboptimal since Google construes the query "Notorious B.I.G." as "Notorious BIG" instead of "Notorious B I G" (i.e., the dots are removed rather than treated as spaces)
Likewise, "Tom's fave pizza" is converted to "tom-s-fave-pizza", when it should be "toms-fave-pizza" (since Google ignores apostrophe's as well)
To create a better parameterize, I need to know which characters Google removes from queries (so I can remove them from my URLs) and which characters Google treats as spaces (so I can convert them to dashes in my URLs).
Better still, does such a parameterize method exist?
(Besides stringex, which I think tries to be too clever. 2 representative problem cases:
[Dev]> "Notorious B.I.G. is the best".to_url
=> "notorious-b-dot-i-g-is-the-best"
[Dev]> "No, Curren$y is the best".to_url
=> "no-curren$y-is-the-best"
I would try using a gem that has been designed for generating slugs. They often make good design decisions and they have a way of updating the code for changing best practices. This document represents Google's best practices on URL design.
Here is a list of the best gems for solving this problem. They are sorted by rank which is computed based on development activity and how many people "watch" changes to the gems source code.
The top one right now is frendly_id and it looks like it will generate good slugs for your use in SEO. Here is a link to the features of the gem. You can also configure it and it looks like it is perfect for your needs.
Google appears to have good results for both the "b-i-g" and "big" in the url slugs.
For the rails side of things, yes a parameterize method exists.
"Notorious B.I.G. is the best".parameterize
=> "notorious-b-i-g-is-the-best"
I think you can create the URLs yourself... something like
class Album
before_create :set_permalink
def set_permalink
self.permalink = name.parameterize
end
def to_params
"#{id}-#{permalink}"
end
end
This will create a url structure of:
/albums/3453-notorious-b-i-g-is-the-best
You can remove the id section in to_params if you want to.
Use the title tag and description meta tag to tell google what the page is called: these carry more weight than the url. So, leave your url as /posts/notorious-b-i-g-is-the-best but put "Notorious B.I.G. is the best" in your title tag.
I have List objects which are shown like this:
www.mysite.com/lists/123
Where 123 is the id of the list. What I would like to do is add the title of the list the url so it it more informative(for google or whatever). So I would like it to look like:
www.mysite.com/lists/123/title-of-list-number-123
How do you go about adding to a url like this? If you just enter:
www.mysite.com/lists/123 w/o the title, should it find the title and then redirect to a new route?
If you want to keep your find-calls as they are (by id), you could do the opposite of what mplacona suggested:
def to_param
"#{id}-#{title.parameterize}"
end
With this, your find(params[:id]) will work because it'll convert the string to an integer (can only succeed if the number is in the beginning of the string). So this is will actually work:
List.find("123-my-title")
and will be the same as
List.find(123)
Read more about this and other ways to accomplish this here: http://gregmoreno.ca/how-to-create-google-friendly-urls-in-rails/
The parameterize will automatically convert the string to a "pretty" url. Read more here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/CoreExtensions/String/Inflections.html#M001367
If you want a bit more functionality, I'll suggest friendly_id aswell.
This article says exactly what you need to do accomplish this.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/63-model-name-in-url
UPDATE
Have a permalink added to your model, and save as follow to it:
def to_param
"#{permalink}-#{id}"
end
On your controller, instead of getting things by the id, get them by the pemalink:
#product = Product.find_by_permalink(params[:id])
And that's all you need.
The screen cast explains all the steps on how to do it.
You could also take a look at friendly id, if you're in the mood for a gem/plugin.