New Addon - BetterSlugs

Addons
#1

Hi Cockpit Community,

Cockpit provides a basic mechanism to handle slugs and we have the UniqueSlugs addon that enhances the core by providing uniqueness of slugs, however, and mostly because I have a scenario that requires a few more options I created a new addon that provides the possibility to define complete paths with dynamic tokens (e.g. blogs/[date:Y]/[field:title] or pages/[field:category]/[field:title], etc.)

The full details on addon are on the github page - https://github.com/pauloamgomes/CockpitCMS-BetterSlugs

1 Like
#2

This plugin works great! I’m just confused as to how to actually implement the slugs once they’re generated. How would I navigate to, for example, blogs/2019/newpost ?

From what I understand, the only way to retrieve a single entry in a collection is to use the api and ?filter the GET request or attach a JSON to a POST request.

#3

Hey @ColinTravis, great you liked it… the slugs are just a representation on how you should access information in your frontend, remember that cockpit is a headless CMS. Let’s imagine you have a blog website, and you have a collection named blog, with a title, summary, date, etc… typically each entry should be accessed in form of blogs/<year>/<post-title>. Having that in slug helps you to build your routes in the frontend, that can be usefully mostly if you are using a static site generator like react-static or gatsby, where all blog collection entries are fetched and the routes are built using the slug as path.

#4

Hey @pauloamgomes

I just opened a ticket for BetterSlugs on github:

  • There’s a typo on line 56
  • Slugs only seem to refresh/update if a lug already exists for the entry. If I run refresh, entries that have not been ‘touched’ yet, won’t update.
#5

Thanks @jasonday for reporting and fix

#6

@pauloamgomes can you speak to the other issue - updating/refresh fields that have not been touched? I get an error unless I open each entry and save it, then the refresh works.

#7

Should be fixed, check on the github issue page.

#8

My format:
{"format": "[collection:name]/[callback:slugDateParts]/[field:name]"}
only returns the name of the entry e.g. “/my-first-event”, so I have some questions/remarks:

  • [collection:name] doesn’t work
  • callback function doesn’t work.
  • Where to place the callback function?
  • How to address a field name in a callback function? Like this “$entry[fieldName]”?

I don’t know whether it is relevant, but the BetterSlug-field was added to an existing collection.

Regards,
Zignature

p.s.
Thanks for all your add-on work! Much appreciated :slight_smile:

#9

Thanks @Zignature for pointing the issue, in fact the collection:name wasn’t working due a regression. Should be ok now.
Regarding the callback function that is described in the readme, in such case you should put your function in a boostrap.php file, the function should be like:

function slugDateParts($entry, $app, $lang = FALSE) {
  return $entry['fieldName'];
}
#10

Thanks for the tips!

I got the callbacks working. Had to split them into 3 functions because lime/helper/utils.php changed my slashes into dashes.
Here’s what I got in config/bootstrap.php:

<?php

function slugYear($entry, $app, $lang = FALSE) {
    $slugYear = substr($entry['start_time'], 0, 4);
    return $slugYear;
}

function slugMonth($entry, $app, $lang = FALSE) {
    $slugMonth = substr($entry['start_time'], 5, 2);
    return $slugMonth;
}

function slugDay($entry, $app, $lang = FALSE) {
    $slugDay = substr($entry['start_time'], 8, 2);
    return $slugDay;
}

And this is my format:

{
  "format": "[collection:name]/[callback:slugYear]/[callback:slugMonth]/[callback:slugDay]/[field:name]"
}

But [collection:name], unfortunately, still doesn’t work.

I updated both Cockpit and BetterSlugs to the latest versions. That didn’t help though.

#11

That’s weird, I tried exactly with the same format you have and works:

image
image480×580 15.3 KB

The error happens when adding a new entry?

#12

I’ll try it with a new collection. See if that works.

#13

It happened editing an entry.
I’ll give it a shot with a new entry too.

#14

I tried in 3 ways and none of them returned the collection name.

  1. Editing an entry in collection Events
  2. Adding a new entry to collection Events
  3. Created a new collection Events2 and added an entry

:confused:

If I don’t get it to work, I’ll (have to) add the collection name to my FE routing. That’ll work too :slight_smile:

#15

Hi, I get an error message (“system error”) when I try to save a collection since installing the addon. The collection is being saved, but the confirmation message has been replaced with the error message.

#16

Can you raise an issue in Github addon repo? Provide also details like what is the field configuration.

#17

After further testing it seems it’s Detektivo that’s causing some issues, not Better Slugs.
Should I open a new thread?