Loading...
 

Short and clean URLs for tracker items by default (don't put the title into the URL)

Status
Pending
Priority
3 Want
Task
Short and clean URLs for tracker items by default (don't put the title into the URL)
Add a timesheet
Add a timesheet for this task
Description

No bug tracker that I know of (GitHub, GitLab, Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, RedMine, Phabricator, etc.) dumps the title into the items' URLs. That's just cruft, visual noise that nobody can re-type from memory or when "shouted across the room during a hackfest or by a coworker in the next cubicle", and SEO doesn't matter as much for tracker items (they are not the same intended usecase as wiki pages and such).

The current behavior has the following problems:

  • Ludicrously long URLs whenever you paste them somewhere, or in the source code of wiki pages, which looks terrible
  • You can't shout the URL at somebody "across the room" unless you know the secret backend implementation detail that the "item####" part is the only required part, which probably nobody knows.
  • It breaks web browsers. Web browsers' bookmark managers rely on the URLs to recognize already bookmarked pages when visiting them. Whenever someone changes the title of a tracker item/ticket, it changes the URL, which means you are breaking everybody's browser bookmarks.



If you want to render fancy stuff with titles within wiki pages, then expose the title through opengraph metadata and have Tiki look for that metadata when rendering the links on-the-fly in pages.

Tiki already only considers the $tracker_name$item_number part to be the only canonical part, so truncating to only that by default would not break anything anyway. The Discourse forums software exposes titles in URLs (possibly for SEO) but they do have automatic redirects all over the place and the canonical part is still the numbers, not the words, and frankly I don't really see why they bother with that words cruft in the URLs.

Ideally, Tiki's URLs format should be $tracker_name/$item_number (with a clean "/" visual separation) rather than all stuck together with no separator (which looks/feels unpolished), or $grouping_or_project_name/$tracker_name/$item_number (ex: "cypht/issues/435"). This is how I've seen it done nicely elsewhere. I would tend to think it should be simple & clean by default, and if you have an option for the elongated version, then that can be the optional (non-default) behavior, because the only case where I can imagine this being a feature is SEO, and it's a very niche usecase that I'm not even sure is valid except in some corner cases.

Files
  1. Tiki URLs Vs Bookmarks
Emails
Assigned to
merci.jacob
Assigned by
jeff.fortin-tam
Also visible to
1- Visible to Anonymous (Public content)
Related
Created
Monday 15 of August, 2022 12:08:51 EDT
by Jeff Fortin T.
LastModif
Friday 05 of July, 2024 07:57:52 EDT