A Symphony CMS field that shorten entry ids to tiny alphanumeric strings (like u8X).
You could build, for example, your own in-site url shortener service having urls like $root/u8X. How cool is that?
- Author: Marco Sampellegrini
- Release date: 30th March 2012
- Version: 0.4
This is based on the Entry URL Field by Nick Dunn.
Let's say you have an url structure like post/category-handle/post-id.
You don't want to rely on services like bit.ly but that url is just too long. Time to give this a try then!
The first thing you'd want to do is to add the field to your Post section.
There's a Url field which should reflect your url structure so, in this case,
we're going to populate it with a value of post/{entry/category/item/@handle}/{entry/@id}.
It's pretty straightforward, you just use xpath expressions as you normally do when building @href links.
That's a relative url, so $root will be prepended automatically.
Ok, this is cool so far, but you need a way to specify if and how the redirect should happen. This is done through datasource filtering.
Choose a page where you want the redirect to happen and pick a datasource which filters by Post section.
I know, I said you would end up with urls like $root/aB4 but I was actually lying.
There are fairly simple workarounds for that, see next section for some hints.
Let's keep it simple for now, so our first goal is to make $root/?r=aB4 redirect to our full url.
On our Index page, we have a datasource that shows the latest posts: we're going to use that one.
Add a new filter by this field with {$url-r} as value. That's it!
With a simple rewrite rule, you can get $root/aB4 to work.
I'm not going to show how to do that anymore, as you can simply achieve the same result using the
Url Router extension. Cool stuff.