Human-readable URLs

[Arantor]

Yes, I mean pretty URLs. Let's get this one out the way: I am, hilariously, not suggesting it for the classical SEO reasons. All the things in my long rant post from years ago still stand.

Anyway.

I think SMF-next should start to adopt human-readable (aka pretty) URLs as a progressive measure. It's completely doable to gradually phase it in, the way phpBB and StoryBB are doing.

The important detail to note is that it is NOT done like the pretty URLs/SimpleSEF mods as a late pass with the buffer, I mean to do it natively as though it's *meant* to be like that.

Partially because I think that pages should be a core feature, and partially because if you're doing pages you really want to have nicer URLs.

example.com/pages/my-page is much nicer than example.com/index.php?action=pages;page=my-page - but more importantly, an increasing number of services don't handle the ; correctly. Facebook never has for example.

This is why I went out of my way in LevGal to produce pretty URLs that would work seamlessly on Facebook etc. for sharing links while still working cleanly in a regular SMF, something like https://smfthemedemos.levertine.org/index.php?media/item/newbalance-style-1.97/ for example (for an item called 'newBalance (style 1)'.

StoryBB demonstrates this works; it's an SMF that also supports a progressive move towards URLs such as example.com/index.php/pages/guidebook (the index.php is also configurable so example.com/pages/guidebook just you don't need htaccess rules for the index.php part)

[marcosbr]

That's why I love you!