A Funkaoshi Production

Clean URLs in Textpattern

   2 May 2004, late afternoon

Update: I've changed the URLs at my site a fair bit. I'll write more about my changes later. I have now managed to avoid using article IDs in any URLs. The changes below should still be valid, but I plan on writing up a more comprehensive guide to fixing URLs in Textpattern at some later date.

Update: You can grab my textpattern install if you are getting tired of waiting for me to write up the way I built my new clean URL scheme.

Update: As of version 4.0.1, Textpattern supports Clean URLs nicely.

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The URLs at my site follow the format suggested by Mamash in one of his older posts in the textpattern forum, with some slight variation. Basically, a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) at my site has the form http://www.domain.com/section/category/page-X/, where X is the page number. If the user is browsing by category, but not in a particular section, then the section becomes '-', so the URL would be something like http://www.domain.com/-/category/page-X/. The reason for using a dash as opposed to a word, like 'category', is that this may suggest that 'category' is a section of the site, which is it not.

The page can be ommited, as can the category, as can the section. Here are some example URLs from my site.

http://www.funkaoshi.com/page-2/ -- second page of the default section http://www.funkaoshi.com/-/web-design/ -- the first page of the category webdesign http://www.funkaoshi.com/immaculate/life/page-3/ -- the third page of the life category in the immaculate section

The trick to cleaner URLs is cleaning up the paging links, and cleaning up the links to articles in a particular category. Once these generated URLs are cleaned up, we will use a .htaccess file to convert the clean URLs back to messy URLs that textpattern can understand.

To print cleaner catergory lists, we need to edit the catergoryt list function in the taghandlers file. Change Line 387 from:

if($a) $out[] = tag(str_replace("& ","& ", $a),'a','href="'.$pfr.'?c='.urlencode($a).'"');

To:

if($a) $out[] = tag(str_replace("& ","& ", $a),'a','href="'.$pfr.'-/'.stripSpace($a).'/"');

To print cleaner paging links, we need to modify the newer and older functions inside the taghandlers file. Change Lines 527--534 from:

'<a href="?pg='.($pg - 1),
($c) ? a.'c='.urlencode($c) : '',
($s && !$url_mode) ? a.'s='.urlencode($s) : '',
'"',
(empty($title)) ? '' : ' title="'.$title.'"',
'>',
$thing,
'</a>');

To:

'<a href="/'
, ( $s && ($s != 'default') ) ? (stripSpace($s).'/') : (($c) ? '-/' : '')
, ($c) ? stripSpace($c).'/' : ''
, 'page-'.($pg - 1).'/'
, '"'
, (empty($title)) ? '' : ' title="'.$title.'"'
, '>'
, $thing
,'</a>');

And change Lines 555,562 from:

'<a href="?pg='.($pg + 1),
($c) ? a.'c='.urlencode($c) : '',
($s && !$url_mode) ? a.'s='.urlencode($s) : '',
'"',
(empty($title)) ? '' : ' title="'.$title.'"',
'>',
$thing,
'</a>');

To:

'<a href="/'
, ( $s && ($s != 'default') ) ? (stripSpace($s).'/') : (($c) ? '-/' : '')
, ($c) ? stripSpace($c).'/' : ''
, 'page-'.($pg + 1).'/'
, '"'
, (empty($title)) ? '' : ' title="'.$title.'"'
, '>'
, $thing
,'</a>');

To print cleaner category links, change Line 704 from:

return '<a href="'.$pfr.'?c='.$thisarticle['category1'].'">'.

to:

return '<a href="'.$pfr.'-/'.stripSpace($thisarticle['category1']).'/">'.

And change Line 717 from:

return '<a href="'.$pfr.'?c='.$thisarticle['category2'].'">'.

To:

return '| <a href="'.$pfr.'-/'.stripSpace($thisarticle['category2']).'/">'.

Now, the mod_rewrite rules I use at this site are given below. This is the one part of the solution I am not 100% on. My rules may not be perfect, and there may be better ways to do this. The rules are straight forward enough if you understand how regular expressions works, if not, you will just have to belive my voodoo magic. The rules below will map categories whose names have at most 3 words. You will need to add rules if you have categories with more then 3 words in their names. The rules you will need to add are in the rules that match categories.

Add these rules to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

#Check for existing file or directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.*) %{REQUEST_FILENAME} [L]

# RSS and Atom feeds.
RewriteRule ^(rss)/?$   index.php?rss="1"   [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^(atom)/?$  index.php?atom="1"  [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

# paged index
RewriteRule ^(page-)([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?pg=$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

# individual article
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([0-9]+)/[^.]*/?$ index.php?id=$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

# section, no category
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&pg=$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

# category, no section.
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1&pg=$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1+$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1+$2&pg=$3 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1+$2+$3 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^-/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?c=$1+$2+$3&pg=$4 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

#section and category
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2&pg=$3 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2+$3 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2+$3&pg=$4 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2+$3+$4 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)-([A-Za-z0-9]+)/page-([0-9]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2+$3+$4&pg=$5 [T=application/x-httpd-php,L]

That should be all you need to do to have cleaner URLs. I'm waiting to see what Dean plans to do with the URL titles stored with messages. Once the next version of Textpattern is out, I will update these instructions.

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