User friendly URLs with MovableType
This is the thing I wanted to do most when I started playing around with MT. User-friendly URLs. But how to do it? I thought it would be best, if the individual archive pages would be named similar than the page title. And suddenly I remembered about the <$MTArchiveCategory dirify="1"$> that made the category archive path look like cat_name_of_category/.
What is that dirify attribute doing, you might ask? Well, let me quote the MT User Manual:
When set to "1", dirifies the tag value. This means that the value of the tag is made suitable for usage in a file or directory name: the value is converted to lower case, HTML tags and entities are stripped, strange characters are stripped (where strange is defined as not included in the following set: alphanumeric characters, underscore (_), and whitespace), and whitespace is then converted to underscores (_).
The same thing would probably fit well for the individual pages. Said so...do some Trial and Error. The Entry's title has to be displayed. So let's try the following:
<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php
Quickly rebuilt the site and guess what?? It worked. Cheers, Yells. So the permalink to this entry should be:
http://www.researc../user_friendly_urls_with_movabletype.php
And it did. Now that's great news, isn't it? For all of you who can figure out these things better when shown an image, here's a screenshot of the change I made:
Please note that you should choose the file extension you configured in your main weblog config menu (so probably you have to change .php to .htm or whatever).
However, I wasn't satisfied with the underscores. Have to keep in mind that Google doesn't treat underscores like a word-separator, while it recognizes dashes. So I wanted to change these underscores to dashes. After some search, I found out about the dirifyplus plug-in for MT. And that did the job. If you're interested, instructions and download options for this plugin are located here.
Posted by Minz Meyer at April 20, 2004, 04:01 PM | To Top
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Very cool, Minz. You are a champ.
This is the kind of thing -- as well as "how to get rid of those annoying pop-ups" -- that I should probably have in the class. It's hard to know on first run-through what's necessary. Thanks for being a patient guinea pig. :) [Do they have that expression, over there?]
--Kynn
Posted by: Kynn Bartlett at April 22, 2004 06:49 AM | Let Cool (this ingredient)
Kewl . . . This is great. Applying Kynn's suggestion for the Category archives to the Individual Entry archives is ingenius . . . ~smacks self in the head for not thinking of it first~. Now to go apply it to mine. Oh and thanks for the link to the dirifyplus plugin. I see I'm going to have to go to the MT Plugin Directory and check out what else I can use ~grin~.
Kynn may call you a guinea pig . . . but to me your a fountain of information.
Posted by: Miss B at April 23, 2004 02:34 AM | Let Cool (this ingredient)
This is great info! Thanks a lot for sharing it and doing all the research. Your blog is wonderful, when I get more time I'll check out the whole thing.
Posted by: Valerie at April 21, 2004 05:05 PM | Let Cool (this ingredient)