URLs and Ampersands

[Pete]

This one's for ryan, but obviously open for discussion to all.

Whilst porting a reasonably large site over to PW I noticed that the ampersand character (&) gets stripped out when a URL is automatically created from a page title.

Is there any chance this could be automatically converted to the word "and" instead? Sure it's not amazingly important, but it allows for more legible URLs.

[apeisa]

Not automatic translation, since that would ruin other than English urls.  Can't you replace those before import or saving page?

EDIT: Not sure what method you are using for import, but if you do it with API, you can set name different from title (you probably already knew this).

<?php
$p->title = "Cool & Nice";
$p->name = "cool-and-nice";

[Pete]

I'm just creating the pages manually.

Perhaps if it's a potential issue with other languages then having that as some sort of config option would be the way to go with it disabled by default?

[Soma]

I reported an issue 2 days ago that is something similar when creating page manually:

https://github.com/ryancramerdesign/P21/issues/41

you could enter more replace functions to your need.

[ryan]

There are problems with PW adding words in this manner, like apeisa mentioned. But I can see that people will want to have different approaches for automatic page name generation. So perhaps this is a good area for us to make more easily hookable.

[Pete]

I think that the best thing for this now that I've thought about it a bit more would be to manage this stuff with some sort of languages module further down the line (think I read that a future version is going to have a multilingual focus in terms of translations).

In that case, aside from being able to translate the admin language it would be helpful if there was a section that you could configure through a configuration page for replacements for title-to-url, so that for each language pack you can specify characters and their replacements on that config page rather than doing it in a file.

On second thoughts, maybe do it all in a file as it's probably easier to have the rest of the language strings in a file...? Just have an array for title-to-url -specific stuff and an array for language strings maybe?

Just thinking out loud

[ryan]

Pete, take a look at /wire/modules/Inputfield/InputfieldPageTitle/InputfieldPageTitle.js in the latest commit. Yesterday I added the ability for it to do single-to-multi char replacements, specific to some German characters that Soma (issue #41) found weren't translating correctly. But the same approach could be used to convert '&' to '-and-', just by adding it to the 'srch' and 'repl' arrays in there. I would go ahead and add the '-and-' in there if I could assume the language was English, so I think you are right that we may eventually need a multi-language support solution for this.

[Pete]

Cheers ryan, I'll check that out