Numerical Alias'

Hi, I encountered a problem when using a numerical alias i.e. 2006 for a folder which handles yearly and monthly archives. I understand the problem being that MODX interprets "2006" as a document id, however this could create problems further down the line for sites that utilise a blog, article or issue archive.

The only way I could get around the problem was by linking to a summary document as the landing page from my navigation. This involved seperate calls to dropdownmenu and was quite an arse-about-face way of skirting the problem.

Do you have any suggestions on how to overcome this problem or should I log this as a bug?

log it... very good find

We might need a better plan for this. The alias set can be everything, other than the letters that are not permited in url. So no matter what, we need to sacrifice something that will prohibit the use of alias with that naming convention. So for now we use fix number. If we don’t want to use fix number, than we need to come up with something else that still prohibit the use of it in alias.

Suggestion please...

So I’ve checked Flyspray and noticed that this bug I logged is still set as unconfirmed, personally I think it’s a bloody serious bug, and would’ve thought ver 0.9.2 would’ve made an attempt to resolve this issue.

Can any of the dev team give me any idea of whether this is being addressed or not?

Quote from: Marschant at Jun 17, 2006, 12:59 PM

So I’ve checked Flyspray and noticed that this bug I logged is still set as unconfirmed, personally I think it’s a bloody serious bug, and would’ve thought ver 0.9.2 would’ve made an attempt to resolve this issue.

Can any of the dev team give me any idea of whether this is being addressed or not?

Only solution I see is to introduce a strict mode of friendly URLs which would effectively disable the accessibility to documents via their ID; this can be enabled to overcome this situation without affecting how others may be using this now. If you have documents (or folders) without an alias’ and have strict mode enabled, those pages (and any of their children if enabling friendly alias paths option) would not be accessible. I would not be opposed to this being the default behavior either.

Thoughts? Other ideas?

I think this we should enable a rule.

1) When Frienly URLs is enable check for for alias first (be it numeric or string)
2) If no alias found and is numeric then check id.

Firstly I’d like to say to all the dev’s like xwisdom, opengeek, sottwell and djamoer: Much respect, each and everyone of you are truely amazing, I really appreciate your openess and willingness to address issues we come up with.

Regarding numerical alias’ I think the rules discussed above are the way to go, generally speaking if you’re going to use friendly url’s then it can be assumed that you’ll take the time to enter an alias for each page (if you’re not using automatic alias generation).

Would this be new methodology be on track for ver 1.0 or perhaps sooner?

You see my site is issue based, so my paths are pretty important for archival and permalink reasons. I’ve decided to publish bi-monthly so I’ve had to restructure all folders to be based on an issue number. This shift from date based folder names is gonna cause issues for people linking to my site and I’d hate to have to restructure 6 months down the line again.

At the moment my problem is this: wanted to structure path as site_url/issues/04/ but as you can see the 04 is causing errors which means I can only structure it as site_url/issue04/ now since there is no parent folder, generating a drop-down menu becomes impossible using the dropmenu snippet which means I have to hand-code the menu in a chunk, not the best methodology but doable.

Please do make note of it inside the bug tracker and we will see how soon such can be implemented

Could you not use a prefix for now - say site_url/issues/-04/?