597243 - Support existing (tiki-formatted) links to SUMO articles

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, task)

Description

[[:Cww]]

A lot of Mozilla web properties and external web sites link to URLs of the format: support.mozilla.com/%LOCALE%/kb/%TITLE%  Where TITLE is the article title with spaces replaced by +s.

We don't want to break that when we change the URL format in Kitsune to use slugs.

Comment 1

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Not sure what the best approach would be here, but one way of doing this might be to look at the top referrers' links and make sure we create redirects for those. That is assuming it's not possible (or too time-consuming) to create redirects for ALL articles...

Comment 2

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

Since we decided to allow anything in slugs, we could just make the slugs of all the articles the same as the current titles.

Otherwise, if there's not a long tail, but just a handful of key articles, maybe we can create redirects by hand that use the current title as a slug.

Comment 3

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Yeah, that might be the smartest solution. We could automatically create slugs matching the current URLs and then we could rename articles later on (which, with the new system, would create redirects automatically).

It wouldn't make the majority of URLs in the new KB pretty by default, but it would mean a very smooth transition, and we'll have plenty of time to rename (and prettify) articles in the future.

Comment 4

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

I think it's the best we have right now without adding another layer of fallback and redirection, further complicating the process of looking up an article by name.

Paul, this bug can be fixed just by using the current title ~s/ /+/ as the slug during the migration.

Comment 5

[Paul Craciunoiu [:paulc]]

This is a good compromise, as it also saves me some trouble and special cases.

Comment 6

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Let's do it! :)

Comment 7

[[:Cww]]

Do we have spec/mechanism for making redirects if we update the slug but not the page title?

Comment 8

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Do we have spec/mechanism for making redirects if we update the slug but not
> the page title?

We have a couple options we're reviewing from a technical stand point. The results on your end should be very similar.

Comment 9

[Paul Craciunoiu [:paulc]]

This is being fixed as part of bug 586487 -- we're making the slugs be exactly equal to titles, except where slugs contain slashes (/) (very few cases).

Comment 10

[Rebecca Billings [:rbillings]]

Verified migrated articles play nicely with spaces in the titles, links function