Articles URL

[JohnHuynh]

Hello,

Currently, I am parsing article base on article ID on URL request. For example:
To go to the content of article **What is the visa on arrival? How to get it? **I am using URL like that http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it--245.html and base on ID 245 to get this page content. 
But, now I want to optimize this URL to http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it.html. Then I got a problem: How to get an article without ID?

Thanks,

[FedeEinhorn]

Well, you need to build some rewrite rules for that to work, it doesn't go automatically to the file querying the DB.

[JohnHuynh]

Hello, 
My google webmaster reported that this URL http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/245/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival-how-to-get-it.html is NOT FOUND and link from http://moz.com/community/q/articles-url

How to fix this problem? Thank you for any help!

[FedeEinhorn]

While don't getting the page URL (which is the article title "what-is-the-visa-on-arrival-how-to-get-it.html" remove the .html and then add an extra field to the DB with a the URL friendly name, for this article, that field will contain "what-is-the-visa-on-arrival-how-to-get-it" then you search your DB for that field and you get the entry ID (of course, adding an index to that new column).

This one is a good solution for small DBs, but when scaling, you may want to use an integer to get the post ID instead, say "http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/245/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival-how-to-get-it.html"

You get the ID plus the title and avoid any issue that may come if you accidentally post an article with the same title (you can have this prevented by looking into the DB before saving the article and if the title exists, you can either change the title or add something to differentiate them, say "-2".

Hope that helps!

[JohnHuynh]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your contributions. I don't use WordPress. We developed out website with python and django framework. My problem here: I could not map one-to-one from URL /what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it.html with that page content in database. Please give me advice!

[MatthewBarby]

Hi John,

This depends on what CMS you are using (if any). If you're using WordPress then you can do this pretty easily by using a search engine friendly URL permalink (which you can often get plugins for on most CMS's).

Let us know what platform you are working on and it will be easier to diagnose.

Matt