I understand the main motivation for the phpBB MOD rewrites is more search engine friendly URLs, but what intrigues me is the advanced MOD's more people friendly URLs. Last night while I was waiting for the little ones to settle down, I installed the MOD on a local installation. EasyMOD tripped over a couple matches and the .htaccess stuff is always tricky, but overall it went smoothly.

To get an idea of how the URLs were transformed, I perused a few hundred titles from my forum. I noticed that some URLs looked "strange" without the apostrophes, so I modified the function below to pretty them up a little, e.g.

1-000-000-000 -> 1000000
i-ll -> i will
& (ignored) -> and
they-ve -> they have

OK, it's not particular sophisticated, but it does seem more readable to me. I suppose one downside of more readable URLs is less forum members will use the [url]...[/url] tag.

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function format_url($url)
{
   $url = preg_replace("(\[.*\])U","",$url);
   $url = str_replace (' & ', ' and ', $url); //dan & -> -and-   
   $url = ereg_replace('([0-9])[,]([0-9])', '\\1\\2', $url); //dan 1,000 -> 1000
   $url = ereg_replace('([A-Z])[\.]([A-Z])', '\\1\\2', $url); //dan U-S-A. -> USA
   $find = array('"','\r\n','\n'); //dan removed &
   $url = str_replace ($find, '-', $url);
   $url = str_replace ('ß', 'ss', $url);
   $url = str_replace (array('ö','Ö'), 'oe', $url);
   $url = str_replace (array('ä','Ä'), 'ae', $url);
   $url = str_replace (array('ü','Ü'), 'ue', $url);
   $find = "ÀÁÂÃÅàáâãåÒÓÔÕØòóôõøÈÉÊËèéêëÇçÌÍÎÏìíîïÙÚÛùúûÿÑñ";
   $replace = "AAAAAaaaaaOOOOOoooooEEEEeeeeCcIIIIiiiiUUUuuuyNn";
   $url = strtr($url,$find,$replace);
   $url = strtolower($url);
   $url = str_replace ('\'s', 's', $url); //dan mary-s -> marys, it-s -> its
   $url = str_replace ('\'t', 't', $url); //dan can-t -> cant, won-t -> wont
   $url = str_replace ('\'ve', ' have', $url); //dan i-ve -> i have
   $url = str_replace ('\'ll', ' will', $url); //dan i-ll -> i-will
   $url = ereg_replace("[^a-zA-Z0-9]", "-", $url);
   while (strstr($url, '--')) $url = str_replace('--', '-', $url);
   $url = (substr($url, 0, 1) == '-') ? substr($url, 1) : $url;
   $url = (substr($url, strlen($url) - 1, 1) == '-') ? substr($url, 0, strlen($url) - 1) : $url;
   return $url;
}

If it's only a matter of dealing with ', you could just replace them all with nothing instead of Hyphens like for now.

Adding :

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   $url = str_replace ("'", '', $url);

After :

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   $url = str_replace (array('ü','Ü'), 'ue', $url);

But be careful, even with the zero dupe you don't want to change all of your urls every other day.


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dcz wrote:If it's only a matter of dealing with ', you could just replace them all with nothing instead of Hyphens like for now.

True, but it's a language-specific issue; I wouldn't recommend that approach for English. Some contractions read well even without the apostrophe, others don't (e.g., "ill" versus "whats"). A minor change for a minor improvement, I suppose.

Today I noticed that blogspot removes "the" / "a" / "an" and similar short words from its generated URLs. phpBB-seo URL generator may wish to follow suit.

we could easily remove all words being shorten than 3 characters for example.
Would be better to avoid a loop though, in format_url().

I'll perform some testing, here is already a solution without loops :

Replace :

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      $url = preg_replace( array('`[^a-z0-9]`i', '`[-]+`') , '-', $url);

with :

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      $url = preg_replace( array('`[^a-z0-9]`i', '`-[a-z]{1,2}-`i', '`[-]+`') , '-', $url);

in phpbb_seo_class.php, will get rid of most latin1 char set words with less than three letters. The problem is that as is, not all case will be handled, like a topic title starting with a word of less than three letters and some other exceptions.

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dcz wrote:

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      $url = preg_replace( array('`[^a-z0-9]`i', '`-[a-z]{1,2}-`i', '`[-]+`') , '-', $url);

in phpbb_seo_class.php, will get rid of most latin1 char set words with less than three letters. The problem is that as is, not all case will be handled, like a topic title starting with a word of less than three letters and some other exceptions.

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Could you please publish a solution that works in all cases? I'm very very interested on this. I would like to get rid of ALL words with less than 3 characters. Thank you.

RC3 will

I definitely NEED that RC3 version! Please check my last messages at http://www.phpbb-seo.com/boards/advance ... html#10301

Maybe you' be lucky, but honestly, I cannot tell, keep faith

dcz wrote:RC3 will

is this for phpb2 or phpbb3


i am not sure about using phpbb3 for at least a year

phpBB3 for now, but we'll soon back-port all the new feature developed while playing with phpBB3

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