21 Apr
2017
21 Apr
'17
3:05 p.m.
Hi, let me enter into this conversion.
Some time ago I've asked for help how to solve problem with diacritics (or
accents) in page names when creating new pages so that the have
url-friendly names. You can search for "strip accents from page name used
in url" in xwiki users mailing list. I've got no hint or solution from
xwiki community till today.
I've come with solution that ensures for simple users, creating
url-friendly names without requiring them to think about the concept of the
page name or page title. They simple enter the desired human readably page
name, and in the code behind of the page creation, I have made some
modifications in createinline.vm to hook into page creation process. The
modifications are mainly javascript based, where I've attache to submit
event of the "form#create", where I replace the entered "title" with
the
one for url-friendly. And for url-friendly name I've used this javascript
based solution on https://pid.github.io/speakingurl/.
I've integrated this principle also into page creation process of FAQ and
Blog applications, which we are using in our xwiki installation.
It would be nice if you could integrate this principle into xwiki so that
everyone can have nice url-friendly urls without worring about it. It is
also suitable for english speaking users. You don't have to worry about
entering spaces or other non-url allowed characters, which make url look
ugly.
Thank you
Best regards
Miroslav Galajda
On 21 April 2017 at 14:02, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
product
can
Agreed. So I’d say it’s even more important to allow the user to be able
to easily view and change the resulting URL when they’re not in English.
Thanks
-Vincent
> Also I think that simple users may care about URL without being advanced
> users. Making them advanced users will expose them to a lot more complexity
On 21 Apr 2017, at 13:52, Marius Dumitru Florea
<
mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
Hi Caty,
> On 21 Apr 2017, at 12:44, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com
> wrote:
>>
>> Let's see what variants we have:
>>
>> 1. Instead of displaying "Title", display the "Name"
instead.
>> This won't solve anything. There is no difference between Page Name and
>> Page Title for the normal users. Seeing "Name" instead of
"Title", will
> not
>> stop the users to enter spaces if they want, so the URL will still have
>> those spaces. We don't force the Page Names to trim spaces.
>>
>> One quick solution here is indeed to use "URL" label instead of
"Name".
> For
>> the reasons Vincent mentioned this might not end up in the product for
> now,
>
> What did I mention? :) What’s preventing us from having it in the > rather soon than later (except workload
ofc)?
>
>> so you will need to do some custom development (changing some
> translations)
>> to have this change. If you want to be "hackish" you can even change
the
>> translation for "Title" to
"URL" instead and hope that your users will
>> enter shorter URLs (since we generate the name from the title).
>>
>> Displaying just Name / URL, means users will still have to go and
change
>> the title manually.
>
> This could be better (with URL name) since when you create a page you’re
> offered the ability to change the title after you click Create.
>
>> The only way to cut a step in the flow is to
>> autogenerate the page names (which we currently do). But for your use
> case
>> you shoyld write a shorting/trimming algorithm, but this is custom,
since
>> you mentioned you want just the initials
and no spaces, etc.
>>
>> 2. Displaying both "Title" and "Name". This will create
confusion and
> need
>> for explanations.
>
> This is not exactly what is suggested either by Vishal nor by me :) What
> we suggested is to let the user enter the URL name and title.
>
> Actually and to be more precise what I was suggesting was to continue to
> let the user enter the title but to show the generated URL as it’s done
in
> AWM. And, importantly to allow the user to
change the last part of the
URL
(it would
change the page name).
> Yes but URLs don't need an advanced user to understand the concept and I
> agree with Vishal that we’re now causing a very large number of pages to
> have %25 in their URLs by default which is quite bad… Of course someone That's why we display these options just for
advanced and
long-time users of XWiki, since they are used to the concepts.
spend
their time monitoring what users are doing and renaming pages
thereafter or educate their users to do that but we’re not helping and
we’re making it difficult.
If your web site is not in English then you're forced to use special
characters like diacritics which makes it hard to avoid URL encoded
characters (the browser location bar displays the URL nicely but if you
copy the URL the result is not nice).
>
>> -----
>>
>> IMO what you are describing is advanced user behavior. Normal users
don't
generally care about their URLs and SEO.
I don’t fully agree with you. I have the feeling (can’t prove it) that a
good number of our users care about the generated URLs.
> than they need to know.
>
>> But the beauty of XWiki is that
>> you can customize it locally to perfectly match your needs.
>
> That’s not exactly true (and it’s far from being easy, just check
> createinline.vm): It means overriding large portions of vm code and
having
> to do manual merges whenever you upgrade. A
major PITA.
>
>> Vincent mentioned something about AWM. I don't see much difference from
> the
>> Create Page. We generate the names from title here too. We display them
> in
>> the breadcrumb, but in a more simple way. Displaying the
> "localhost"/server
>> part is not simple user behavior. AWM is more complex.
>>
>> -----
>>
>> So I would not change anything on the product side, since I believe
these
>> should be solved as custom changes for
your instance.
>> We want to encourage users to use page titles (with spaces in them
since
>> they are more readable and supported),
while we are preserving the page
>> name behavior for advances users (but we don't enforce it).
>
> I don’t agree with this sentence: We definitely don’t want to encourage
> users to use titles in URLs.
>
>> If users made
>> mistakes they can always change the title or rename the page.
>> On the product side the only change I would like us to do is using the
> URL
>> naming, but this was debated in the past and dropped for Vincent's
> reasons.
>
> What reasons, I don’t remember a discussion about using URL name instead
> of page name?
>
> So our main disagreement is that I consider that favouring encoded
> characters in URLs is not a good thing while you think it’s not a large
> enough problem to do something about it.
>
> Would it make our UI too complex to use for simple users if we were
> showing a URL and the ability to change the last part of it? IMO what’s
> complex is when we have Page name and Page Title. But I don’t feel
there’d
> be confusion between URL and Page title.
>
> What do others think?
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Caty
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>> On 20 Apr 2017, at 22:51, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Actually, if I remember well, what we were doing was to ask for the
page
>>> name and we were setting the title to
the same as the page name by
> default
>>> and then the user could edit the title before saving the page.
>>>
>>> We’ve now done the opposite (user deciding on the title and page name
>>> being derived from it) but leading to the issue you’re raising about
URL
>>> SEO…
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> -Vincent
>>>
>>>> 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%20Minutes%20Application/AppWithinMinutes-Step1.png
>>>>
>>>>> 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
>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.
>>> com/Page-Title-and-Name-confusion-tp7603546p7603551.html
>>>>> Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.