NOTE¶ ↑

This gem is deprecated in favor of the new Rewritten gem. It’s better to make use of the new gem because being Rack based it decouples URLs from your App: no need alter routing, models, controllers and views as with the SpeakingURL gem here.

Speaking URL¶ ↑

The Speaking URL Gem provides an extension for the routes.rb file of your Rails-App to allow for arbitrary URL being used for resources. The Gem is mainly SEO-motivated; it facilitates:

Usage of so called “static” or “nice-looking” URLs,
Implementation of a SEO friendly URL strategy,
Usage of different style URLs for resources of the same type
And (from a SEO-point maybe most importantly) Modification of URL strategies with proper HTTP (301) redirects.

This Gem does not:

generate URLs
manage all of your App’s URLs

These points have to by managed by yourself.

Installation¶ ↑

Add the gem to your Rails-App by including it in your Gemfile:

gem "speaking_url"

Usage¶ ↑

A quick list of steps that have to be done in order to get started with using this Gem follows.

Usage in your models¶ ↑

The Speaking Url must be setup within the models (resources) that you want to assign a Speaking URL to.

class Person
  include Mongoid::Document
  include SpeakingUrl::MongoResource
end

This adds an array field urls to the Person resource, where the current url and the url history are stored.

To add a new route to a some resource, use the add_mapping method instead of modifying the field directly.

@person.add_mapping('/some/new/mapping')

Core Extensions¶ ↑

The gem comes with some helpful inflection methods for the String class.

urlify : replaces all white space and special characters with dashes
unumlaut : converts German Umlauts to their ASCII counterparts

Additionally, the methods upcase and downcase are made Umlaut aware.

Configuring routes¶ ↑

To actually deploy the new routes, the Gem ships with the speaking_url_resource method. You simply provide the resources as symbols:

speaking_url_resource :person, :product

As a a result both - the person and product resource - are made accessible by their speaking url(s). The controller is inferred from the model name, but can be customized:

speaking_url_resource :person, :controller => 'vip/persons'
speaking_url_resource :product, :controller => 'my_products'

NOTE: You probably want to include the lines as one of your last statements in your route.rb file to:

give standard routes higher priority
and achieve better performance (due to DB calls in the routing process)

Usage in Controllers ¶ ↑

In the appropriate controllers actions a specific resource is no longer fetches by it’s databse ID, but by the request.path:

@search = Person.find_by_url(request.path)

You can be sure there that a resource is found because otherwise the the controller wouldn’t have been called by the routing mapper.

Usage in views ¶ ↑

Instead of using the default rails route helpers in your views, you want to use the speaking url helpers:

<%= link_to "A nice person", @person.current_url %>

Outlook and Todo¶ ↑

So far the Gem is pretty limited. What could be developed for following version is:

more configuration options
support for other persistent storage mappers
go to a single table/collection implementation for performance and more flexibility (i.e. index and create actions/routes)
make this a rack application

learnjin/speaking-url