20 Apr
2017
20 Apr
'17
10:51 p.m.
Hi Vishal,
Ok, I misunderstood you in your first email. I understood the opposite. I thought you were
complaining that have 2 notions (page name + page title) was confusing but it’s actually
the opposite! What you find confusing is the fact that it’s not easy for your users to set
both the page name and page titles!
It’s funny (or not :)) since this is exactly what we had in past versions of XWiki and we
had several complaints that it was confusing to have the 2 notions and this is why he hid
the page name only for advanced users.
See below.
On 20 Apr 2017, at 14:20, Vishal
<thewikinoteorg(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Vincent for your thorough reply..
You guessed it right. We intend to have clean and short urls for SEO
reasons.
Current scheme creates two problems:
1) The Page name is fetched automatically from the Title. Often the titles
have spaces which translate as *percent characters *in url which makes it
somewhat unclean :)
Indeed you’re right. By hiding the page name we’re now incitating to have longer URLs and
encoded characters showing up in URLs which is not nice I agree.
Maybe one solution is to do something similar to what we do in AWM, i.e. generate
automatically the URL from the title entered by the user and show the resulting URL to the
user and give the user the opportunity to change the URL.
See
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/Extension/App%20Within%20Min…
2) Secondly, to have the shorter url, we use only the
short forms of
complete title.
Ex. For title 'Pune University' we use name PU.
Hey, you’re from Pune? :) I’ve been there about 15 times! That was in a previous job where
my company and KPIT Cummins were partners.
Otherwise in this hierarchy of pages, the url would be
much longer.
Ex. We have page 'Electronics and Telecommunications' branch under page
'Pune University'. We should not have such a long url. Instead here we need
PU/ENTC or Pune-University/ENTC
To avoid all this, what we currently do:
1) On create page dialog, use PU as title.. This will create url as PU.
If full name is used here as title, we need to use - instead of spaces to
avoid percent characters in url.
2) While in edit mode, change the title back to Pune University. Remove any
- characters to make title clean.
This is where confusion creeps in.
If these two terms create confusion, why I need to show them both:
I guess the *confusion is due to term Name*. It doesn't reflect actual usage
of the term. URL or weblink or link or web address would be more apt terms
to use to instead of Name.
Regarding Page name vs Page URL.
A bit of history: The reason we used page name and not page URL originally is because what
the user is creating is a document in the database and initially it was called Document
Name. Since that was a bit confusing for users, we had decided to call it Page Name. It
just happened that the URL used was directly derived from the document/page name.
In practice the 3 concepts could have different values:
* a value for the document’s name in the DB
* another value for the document’s title
* yet another value used in the URL.
We’ve had discussions so that we could let the user provide shorter URLs for pages in the
future.
Now for the time being and since we don’t have this ATM, I think I agree with you that we
could decide to display to the user the URL that will be generated (the encoded URL) and
allow the user to change it. Internally the user would change the document name.
My users can differentiate between Title and URL. But
the whole procedure we
follow is certainly not understandable by all. And we definitely need to
follow this whole long procedure, just to have short and clean urls.
Yes, if you’re asking your users to care about the URLs that get generated, right now they
need to be advanced users to be able to edit the page name in the Create Page UI (since
changing the title afterwards is too cumbersome).
So, by showing both fields at the first place itself,
I would like to
shorten the procedure and url length.
I’m in agreement with you. Let’s see what others think.
Thanks for this interesting discussion!
-Vincent
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