There a very easy system that's used in the SImplemachines Engine:
1) Use PHP output buffering to store the HTML output of the software and then run a regex on it to convert all underscores in internal urls to dots (or another separator character)
2) Write a short function in index.php to convert the request url dots back to underscores.
I haven't checked code to see if output buffering is already being used. What do you think?
On 5/14/06, Elliott F. Cable ecable@avxw.com wrote:
I have to say it'd be cool if you'd integrate this, but I'd suggest dashes (-) instead of periods (.) - it'd make more sense to the end- user, and be more user-friendly. Perhaps, just make it an option as you suggested - a configuration variable. Check with brion about getting into the SVN team to comit you're changes.
On May 13, 2006, at 2:22 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
100? Ouch!
Google recognizes keywords in urls that are separated by dots or hyphens, but words separared by underscores are viewed as one unit.
A Google rep even recommended hyphens over underscores: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23564.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4572.htm
The difference is really small, and if a project gets a lot of link love (like wikipedia) it probably wouldn't matter, I guess.
On 5/13/06, Elliott F. Cable ecable@avxw.com wrote:
... How will this affect you're search engine rankings? And you'd have to modify them ALL, every single one - if you missed one, it would break major things, would it not? The whole linking scheme, really.
I'd say 100+. I could be wrong, but in my experience hacking mediawiki, everything is so tightly interwoven that changing even a small tiny thing that you think would only appear once, actually appears in 10 different places. Making this a variable in some ways wouldn't be a bad idea, but in others, it wouldn't work - what about interwiki linking? Templates? using dots in titles that are NOT spaces?
But again, how would this help with google?
On May 13, 2006, at 1:19 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
Well,
I'm launching a new site that I'll be developing for years or more, and I feel that if this project that'll take maybe a few hours in a weekend will affect my search engine rankings by even just 5%, it's worth getting it over with right now.
If the community will help me, then instead of just changing the underscores to dots i might even be able to create a patch which makes it possible for people to use any character as the separator character.
How many places do you think I'll need to modify? 5? 10? 20? 50?
Seun. http://www.nairaland.com/
On 5/13/06, Elliott F. Cable ecable@avxw.com wrote:
You'd have to look through most of the source code for mediawiki, methinks. Big project. WHy, if I may ask?
On May 13, 2006, at 1:09 PM, Seun Osewa wrote:
Hello,
I would like to change the separator character on my mediawiki installation from the current underscore format to dot format.
I have read a previous exchange in which it was noted that the underscore is hard-coded into mediawiki in many places, but i feel it would be worth the effort.
What are the places/files/directories where I should start looking? Thanks!
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