magento category urls - url

I'm getting "-1" appended to some of my category urls. e.g. bedroom.html becomes bedroom-1.html. How do I stop this happening and correct the current ones.
Thanks.

This happens if you have duplicate identifiers ('URL key'). If you've removed/renamed the duplicates, you might need to run the Rewrite refresh/re-index from the Cache Management page under "System".

Related

Send only the key of the check_box_tag if checked

I have a bunch of filter categories represented by checkboxes, right now it's sending the full name + on in the query_params.
/?max%5D=5&Movies=on&Art=on&Outdoors=on
Instead, I'd rather just look for the presence of the key to know it's there. This would make the url a bit shorter for people to copy/paste.
/?max%5D=5&Movies&Art&Outdoors
Or, can I have one category key with all the checkboxes as values?
I think it's not possible by default, you'd have to construct an onsubmit script to build the URL and redirect to it, rather than posting directly to the server. You might be better off leaving it as it is.

Trick when dynamically appending GET attributes

When dynamically building SQL queries you often see something like this:
WHEN 1=1 AND title="Example" AND ...
The purpose of the 1=1 is to be able to keep appending AND-statements without having to check if any previous statements exist. Thereby avoiding something like this happening:
WHEN AND title="Example" AND ...
I quite often come across a related issue when building the the attributes/search-query for a GET request. I don't want to keep checking if I need to prepend the attribute with '?' or '&'.
So my question is, is there any 'safe' way for me to add an initial attribute that won't interfere with any potential software on the server side. Assuming I do not have full knowledge of the backend.
Something like:
http://example.com?1=1&title=example
http://example.com?null&title=example
http://example.com?i-am-useless&title=example
Or is this allowed?
http://example.com?&title=example
Is there perhaps a simpler way to solve this?
Make sure the URI-string you want to add parameters to already ends in a '?'. Then for every key-value pair, add 'key=value&' to it. Optionally you can then in the end delete the last character from the resulting string. - Reddit user omepiet

How to access a scope if its name is being used as a query column

Dealing with some legacy code we came across a rather annoying situation. We are looping through a query with the <cfoutput query="x"> tag. That query has a column named 'url'. Within that loop we need to check if a key exists within the url scope. Since CF puts a priority on what's in the query over general page scopes I can't use a structKeyExists(url,"key") since as far as CF is concerned at this point, url is a string with the value from the current row of the query.
How can I break out of the query scope and inspect what's in my url?
As a temporary we are using isDefined("url.key"), but I would still like to know if there is a way to break out of the query scope.
Also can't really change the column, or even the column name in the query without a few hours of work tracking down an changing all references to it, so we're going to avoid that if at all possible.
EDIT:
There seems to be some confusion as to how this code is set up, and why the simple solutions don't apply. It would be hard for me to give a thorough example but I will try to clarify the situation.
There are many pages that would count as 'pageA' for the following example. Enough that changing how things work would require a change in scope and investment in time that's just not going to happen in the time allotted.
PageA runs a query with one of the columns being named url, then starts an output loop via cfoutput, inside that loop PageB is included. One PageA may have different variables in the URL scope than another PageA, actually they are the same, but may be named differently(varID=x in one case vid=x in another). Inside of PageB I need to use the value from that url scope, so I want to run through the different possible names (if key 'varID' exists in url, use it, otherwise use 'vid').
This is why I want to "punch through" the query scope to get the url structure, and not the url column from the query. Any other method seems to require modifying the many PageAs.
So the question is not how to solve this problem specifically, as there are many ways to do it, I would just really like to avoid them as they all add a lot of time in implementation and testing. The question remains, is there a way to access the url scope as a variable if url exists as a query column and you are in the query scope.
I thought it might work to create a function that returned the url scope, but upon testing it, even with a local-scoped query (which prevents the function using the query itself) the use of url inside the function is still corrupted:
<cffunction name="getUrlScope"><cfreturn Url /></cffunction>
...
<cfoutput query="x">
<cfif StructKeyExists( getUrlScope() , 'key' )>
<!--- still fails :( --->
There is however an undocumented (meaning unsupported and liable to change) option. If you dump getPageContext() you will see a bunch of functions that do interesting things, including dealing with scopes.
You can use getPageContext().SymTab_findBuiltinScope('URL') to get at the URL scope.
You can also use getPageContext().getCfScopes() to get an array of scopes. I'm not sure if the order is guaranteed fixed but it seems to be [cgi,?,url,form,cookie,?] checking on both CF10 and cflive (CF9), so possibly is.
(In CF8 there was the method getBuiltinScopes, which returned a struct instead of an array - this no longer appears to exist, reinforcing the whole unsupported and changeable nature of these methods.)
On Railo those don't work, but there is getPageContext.UrlScope() and similarly-named functions for the other scopes.
One solution would be to assign the url struct to a new variable outside of the cfoutput tag and then reference that variable instead of url. Example:
<cfset urlScope = url>
<cfoutput query="x">
<cfset keyExists = structKeyExists(urlScope, "key")>
</cfoutput>
My solution for this is always to alias the url column in the query as int
SELECT URL as qURL FROM myTable ...
IF you don't have access to the query (it's a stored precedure or used elswhere etc) you can always use query of a query to reselect it with your alias.
I don't care for the idea of creating a separate reference to URL outside the output - but that would also work. I just want to KNOW what is user input (i.e. comes from the URL or FORM) and what is generated internally (i.e. comes from a query).
Couldn't you move structKeyExists(url,"key") outside of the cfoutput block, and store that into a variable? Or do a structAppend to copy the url struct into another struct named something else?
Another approach is to replace your cfoutput block with a cfloop block.
<cfloop from="1' to = "#YourQuery.recordcount#" index = "idx">
<cfif StructKeyExits(url,"key")>
<cfoutput>
#url.key# is not the same as #YourQuery.url[idx]#
which can also be referenced like this #YourQuery["url"][idx]
etc

SEO: URL for detail page, include categories or not?

I'm working on a new advert website and want to implement some good SEO URLs.
I got category URLs like:
/category
/category/sub-category
This seems ok. What about detail pages?
Option 1:
/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Option 2:
/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
In reality my website has a pretty long URLs due to multiple areas you can shop. So it would become:
/en/area-name/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
/en/area-name/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Which detail page would be a better URL? The first option seems to be better if the product has no long/good title. The second seems better as its the most relevant one and shortest especially with long category names.
I would like to hear your thoughts!
EDIT:
I found this two google docs:
http://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Fdocs%2Fsearch-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf&ei=lXyaT6T_L8zR4QSM4c2qDw&usg=AFQjCNEMj8KHxhxQz9cMLoMxMDiLdrAbJw
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329
I think I will be going for /adverts. Anyone disagree?
i have seen many of SEO analysts miss something about optimizing their webpage and that is your page will be optimized for only some keywords not all keywords. it is not important how length is your URL. you should first analyze whether the contents in your webpage is rich enough to have such URL with these keywords or not. if the answer for every keyword is yes then the more length will give you the more rank.
I think you can even set your pages up in a way to use only the slug and skip the id, such as:
/adverts/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
or even just:
/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
like this and refer straight to the adverts controller and the advert itself, which has this slug assigned to it (the one with id 15880).
This way you'll have nice and clean URLs. Just assign and keep an unique slug for each advert and handle it using .htaccess, or dynamically inside the code of your site, if the system allows it.
Cheers.

Why do some URLs contain both numeric id and name?

I am wondering why the link to profile looks like:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/ID/NAME
not simply:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/ID
or even better:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/NAME
Can there be couple users with the same name? Or can one user have many names?
All SO-URLs are of the form id/description where the ID is unique and the description is optional. So /users/12890/arne-burmeister is the same as /users/12890/huhu and /questions/420380/why-does-the-link-to-the-user-profile-have-both-id-and-name is the same as /questions/420380/foo. The retrieval just uses the ID, but it is much better for google ranking, when the user/question/what-ever-should-be-found occurs in the URL (also for humans this is much more descriptive ;-).
By the way, retrieval by ID is faster than by such a large text string. And of course, the URL remains valid if someone changes their user name or the question.
The part after the last slash seems to be SEO related (i.e. making the url more expressive).
On the urls that I tested you could replace that part with whatever you wanted, it still worked. So the url http://stackoverflow.com/users/37086/othername still points to your profile.
I would assume doing a database lookup solely on the name string would be more expensive than a numerical lookup on the primary key, even if the name column is indexed. The name is then added on to make the URLs more user and SEO friendly.
There is a uservoice request for this. If you want this to happen, uservoice is the right place to discuss / vote up.
Your name on SO is not unique click on users and type Josh, there's a whole page of us. So you have to have the ID. As for why the name everyone else's guess is as good as mine.
Try changing or removing the name and see what happens.
I think it's just so that your URLs tell you what to expect, but the application doesn't need (or actually use) that information.
Amazon does something quite similar with their books, if I remember correctly: They've got both the ASIN (their internal ID) and the name of the book in the URL, but only ever look up the ASIN.
Just speculating: The ID allows very fast retrieval of the data the profile page presents. The name is just for humans and ignored since it's easier for me to no that you are rkj and I am phihag than that your ID is 37086 and mine is 35070.

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