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using permalinks to access articles without specifying the date in typo

Posted by miles 11/09/2008 at 18h59

I recently switched from mephisto to typo, mostly due to lack of activity and features in the mephisto project.

With mephisto, I had to make a modification to allow me to use permalinks without the date to access articles. For example, so I could say http://nopugs.com/permalinks-without-dates instead of http://nopugs.com/2008/09/11/permalinks-without-dates I’m not sure why this isn’t already a feature of such blogging systems. I’m somewhat new to blogging so perhaps there’s a good reason. Maybe there are sometimes different articles with the same permalink (I don’t know why somebody would do this.)

Regardless, here’s how I modified typo to allow me to do this.

In app/controllers/redirect_controller.rb change the redirect method from this:

 def redirect
    if (params[:from].first == 'articles')
      path = request.path.sub('/articles', '')
      url_root = request.relative_url_root
      path = url_root + path unless url_root.nil?
      redirect_to path, :status => 301
      return
    end

    r = Redirect.find_by_from_path(params[:from].join("/"))

    if(r)
      path = r.to_path
      url_root = request.relative_url_root
      path = url_root + path unless url_root.nil? or path[0,url_root.length] == url_root
      redirect_to path, :status => 301
    else
      render :text => "Page not found", :status => 404
    end
  end

to this:

  def redirect
    if (params[:from].first == 'articles')
      path = request.path.sub('/articles', '')
      url_root = request.relative_url_root
      path = url_root + path unless url_root.nil?
      redirect_to path, :status => 301
      return
    end
   
    article = Article.find_by_permalink(params[:from].first)
   
    if article
      redirect_to article_path(article)
      return
    end

    r = Redirect.find_by_from_path(params[:from].join("/"))

    if(r)
      path = r.to_path
      url_root = request.relative_url_root
      path = url_root + path unless url_root.nil? or path[0,url_root.length] == url_root
      redirect_to path, :status => 301
    else
      render :text => "Page not found", :status => 404
    end
  end

Then in app/models/article.rb change findbypermalink from this:

  def self.find_by_permalink(year, month=nil, day=nil, title=nil)
    unless month
      case year
      when Hash
        year, month, day, title = date_from(year)
      when Array
        year, month, day, title = year
      end
    end
    date_range = self.time_delta(year, month, day)
    find_published(:first,
                   :conditions => { :permalink => title,
                                    :published_at => date_range }) \
      or raise ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
  end

to this:

  def self.find_by_permalink(year, month=nil, day=nil, title=nil)
    unless month
      case year
      when Hash
        year, month, day, title = date_from(year)
      when Array
        year, month, day, title = year
      end
    end
    
    if year && !month && !day && !title
      year, title = title, year
    end
    
    published = nil
    
    if year
      date_range = self.time_delta(year, month, day)
      published = find_published(:first,
        :conditions => { :permalink => title,
          :published_at => date_range }) 
    end
    
    unless published
      published = find_published(:first, :conditions => {:permalink => title})
    end
      
    raise ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound unless published
    published
  end

Then you should be able to leave the year/month/day off of your article URLs when sharing them with friends and such.

Enjoy!

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