Pretty / SEO-Friendly URLs

It's very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes to have your URLs be human-readable. Refinery CMS ships with software (FriendlyID) that enables these marketing-friendly URLs with only minor modifications.

This guide will show you how to:

• Implement marketable URLs on a custom extension.

WARNING: This method is tested with Refinery CMS v. 2.0.0 only. It should be applicable to later versions, but not earlier versions (1.0.9 or earlier). It is known to work with Refinery CMS v. 3.0, but has not been tested extensively. Always ensure your code is backed up or under version control before making substantial changes.

Fresh Slugs

FriendlyID requires that you create a string field entitled slug on any model that you wish to convert. It's better to do this as a separate migration after creating the extension, because you don't want Refinery to auto-generate a field in the back-end; this attribute is set by code, not by hand.

To do so, create a new migration file in the db/migrate folder of your extension. Since this depends on the previous migration, it's best to rename the other migrations to include a sequence reference in the filename – for example, create_staff_members.rb becomes 001_create_staff_members.rb. When you re-run the generator that will move these migrations over to your main db/migrate folder, they will be moved in this order. Don't worry if you've already run these migrations; Rails will auto-detect that you've run them, even though the filename has been changed, and it won't re-run them.

Inside your migration, write something like this:

class AddSlugToRefineryStaffMembers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :refinery_staff_members, :slug, :string
     add_index :refinery_staff_members, :slug
  end
end

Run the generator that you ran initially to create your extension, and then migrate. In the above example, since the extension is named staff_members, one would run:

$ rails generate refinery:staff_members
$ rake db:migrate
$ rake db:seed

Adding Friendly ID

In your model, add the following lines after the opening class line:

extend FriendlyId
friendly_id :title, use: [:slugged]

And in your controller, use the following instead of StaffMember.find

StaffMember.friendly.find(params[:id])

If you want to use a different field than title from which to generate the URL, be sure to change the first symbol after friendly_id to be in accordance (for example, many extensions use name instead).

Also be sure to remove any to_param method that exists, or this will interfere.

Restart your server.

Refreshing All Existing Entries

Each entry must be re-saved to generate its slug. You can do this quickly from the Rails console (obviously, replace StaffMember with your model's name):

StaffMember.all.map(&:save)

If all entries in the resulting array return true, everything is complete! If you have an entry return false, you may have some individual issues that prevent saving, and you can update these manually using the Refinery CMS administrative interface.