Improving Page Name & URL Structure for xwiki.org

Development
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Hello everyone! :waving_hand:

For SEO purposes and overall consistency, xwiki.org should change its approach to how it creates URLs and page names.

Currently, xwiki.org doesn’t seem to have any defined rules regarding the URL structure.

We (@vmassol, @paulinebessoles and myself) proposed a strategy for page naming for documentation pages, but after receiving some feedback and some further research, we decided to update the approach as follows:

Page Name Rules

  • Use Kebab Case. (See reasoning).
  • Page names should follow page titles as much as possible, but still follow the other rules
  • Avoid repetitive page names in the URL path. This happens when a child page repeats the same word or a variation of it that is already present in the parent page name.
    • For example, instead of ../wiki-editor-toolbar/wiki-editor-toolbar-support, the proposed alternative is: ../wiki-editor-toolbar/support. Even if “support” is too generic on its own, having the parent wiki-editor-toolbar provides enough context for search engines to understand the full meaning.
    • Example: If the page title is “Choose a Syntax when Editing”, the page name should be choose-syntax-editing, but considering the fact that the parent is ../edit-page/, the page name should be ../edit-page/choose-syntax.
    • Note: This rule is feasible because the LD filters are based on the page title, not the page name, so avoiding repetition in the URL will not cause duplications in LD results.

Migration Strategy

We need to implement a name strategy for kebab-case and apply it to xwiki.org. This means that when a page is created, for example in this manner: “[[Developer Guide]]”, its URL will automatically be transformed into ../developer-guide. We need to ensure that this applies also to extensions pages created on Extension when new extensions are imported or added manually.

Initially, this strategy should be applied to:

  • All pages located in the new location on the main wiki.
  • Pages linked from the horizontal menu .
  • Pages linked from the footer.
  • When an existing extension page has been completely refactored into pages in the new “/Doc” space and the only thing that remains is a link to the extension doc, also rename the extension at that point.
  • Any new page created on xwiki.org after the proposal is accepted.
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Note that this would be done by the doc team for now.

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+1, thanks

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Hello!

Please also check the following proposal: Image Names that is related to the page naming proposal.

Thanks!

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Sounds great! If I could, I’d give a +1.

I do have a question though: since the URLs would not include stop words, it would theoretically be possible for the rules to push towards the same URL for 2 distinct pages (e.g.: whatever/a-something and whatever/the-something would both need to be turned into whatever/something, if I understand the rules correctly). What would happen in these cases?

Note that I’m certain that these would happen extremely rarely, if at all, but it is an edge case I thought of, so I wanted to mention it.

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you’ll just need to pick a better page name :slight_smile:

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Thant makes sense :sweat_smile: .

Thanks!