Rewriting the friendly URLs

Hi there !

OK I got a dynamic page based on some query parameters, let's say :

http://whatever.com/modx-page.html?product=white-product
http://whatever.com/modx-page.html?product=black-product
http://whatever.com/modx-page.html?product=red-product

Now, I want these URLs to look nicer, for example :
http://whatever.com/modx-page-white-product.html
http://whatever.com/modx-page-black-product.html
http://whatever.com/modx-page-red-product.html

How would you do that ? This is not just a 3 products things, there are 100's of products so this is not something I can do manually within the manager doing tricks or whatever with aliases.

I came with the idea of rewriting with some Apache rules.

Worked great with 2.1.5. Now 2 days ago I upgraded to 2.2.1 and the stuff is broken. Why ? Because of this piece of code in modxrequest.class.php / _cleanResourceIdentifier :

$requestUri = preg_replace('/\?.*/', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
if ($this->modx->getOption('base_url', null, MODX_BASE_URL) . $identifier !== $requestUri) {
$parameters = $this->getParameters();
unset($parameters[$this->modx->getOption('request_param_alias')]);
$url = $this->modx->makeUrl($this->modx->aliasMap[$identifier], '', $parameters, 'full');
$this->modx->sendRedirect($url, array('responseCode' => 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'));
}

Basically it checks if the URL is what it's supposed to be (ie : is modx-page-white-product.html the correct URL ?), if not (that's the case, it should be http://whatever.com/modx-page.html?product=white-product), a redirect happens. Which make all my efforts to have nice URLs pointless.

Question is, why was this added ? Any developer out there that could point the reason ? If there's a good reason or no developer can answer, can anyone think of an alternative solution to the problem ?

Thanks !

From what I know that piece was added to make sure resources are only accessible via their set URI, adhering to strict SEO rules. Though I did think that was made optional through a system setting?

Maybe you can post your rewrites, perhaps there's something we can change about that to satisfy your requirements.

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the answer.

Looking at the code, there's no settings check, which would have been great actually cause I had to hack the file, which sucks.

The rewrite is pretty basic, takes the modx-page-(.*)\.html and redirects to index.php?q=modx-page.html?product=[whatever was caught by the regular expression]. I don't have the exact rule cause actually the example was just an example, in my site it's not about white or red products, it's a little bit more complicated but the rule works, no problem with that.

The general idea / problem is that you can't anymore rewrite your URLs. I guess that I'm not the only one doing this rewrite trick so I was hoping someone had another solution.

Actually I'll take a look at VisionCart, I'm pretty sure that they manage to do something to have nice URLs instead of ?productId=1, don't they ?

Well anyway, again thanks for the answer, if you have another solution don't hesitate and making this a settings could definitely be great (if others have the same problem as me).

..takes the modx-page-(.*)\.html and redirects to index.php?q=modx-page.html?product..

If it's done exactly how you sketch it there, you'll need to replace that second question mark with an ampersand (&).

That code should only look at whatever is passed into the "q" url parameter, and not what comes after it like your &product=xyz

Yeah my mistake, I did this quick to match the example but don't worry about the rewrite, it's not a rewrite problem, the rule is OK !

When I debug the code, it compares "modx-page-white-product.html" with "modx-page.html", and because they don't match, does the redirect, which made the rewrite in the first place pretty useless.