ColdFusion on Wheels

The Importance of URL Rewriting

Cathy Shapiro — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:37:00 +0000

I am terrible about explaining things sometimes, and lately I've been working with a client on URL rewriting. I've done a lot of techno-speak but I'm not sure that I have really explained in laymans terms what URL rewriting is, and why it's important.

What is it?

When you go to your About us page on your web site right now, if you typed in the whole address into your browser, it might look something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.cfm/sitepages/show/2

That URL doesn't tell us anything about the page, and it's very hard to remember.

Wouldn't it be better to have that URL be this?

http://www.yoursite.com/About-Us

That is URL rewriting. It's the process of making your page names descriptive, instead of cryptic.

When we start rewriting those URL's, a great thing happens... you can now anticipate what a page will be.

Want to find out about services? My guess would be the URL would be:

http://www.yoursite.com/services

Want to go to the contact us page? My guess would be:

http://www.yoursite.com/Contact-Us

Best of all, those guesses would be right! So by rewriting the URL's, the first thing we've done is make those pages easy to remember. If I'm on my smart phone and don't want to have to go to the home page of your site, to get to your contact page, I can now easily remember how to get there. With so many people using the browsers on their phones, making those pages easy to get to is going to increase your traffic.

But URL rewriting isn't just for people, it's for search engines too.

Google and other search engines give your pages a "rank." When you do a search, the pages with the highest rankings show up first.

By making the name of the page descriptive of the content, your rank will improve, and therefore your pages will show up higher in searches.

So hopefully that is a simple explanation of what URL rewriting is, and why it's so important. If you are serious about SEO, URL rewriting is a smart thing to do.

Implementing URL rewriting in CFWheels
This is just how I do it in CFWheels. I'd really like to hear how others are accomplishing it to see if I can improve on the method.

Let's create a hypothetical table called "sitepages."
In that table, I create a field for the title of the page and a unique field for the "slug."

In the sitepages model, I add a beforeSave callback.

<cfset beforeSave("checktheslug")>

Then, I create the "checktheslug" function:

If the user doesn't specify a slug, then the slug takes the title of the page, replaces spaces with hyphens, and then strips out any extraneous characters like quotation marks, exclamation points, etc.

Then all I have to do is set up a route, and I'm in business:

addRoute(name="sitepages", pattern="pages/[slug]", controller="sitepages", action="show");

Ron Black on Beginner Tutorial: Hello Database

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:05:52 +0000

Documentation Comment by Ron Black on Beginner Tutorial: Hello Database:

Be careful. When setting up a model("xxx").new(). Make sure xxx does not already exist in the database under a different schema that the login id can see. I was using Oracle when I tried setting up the <cfset user = model("user").new()>. Well I kept getting an error about columns not existing. CFWheels must do a select column_name from all_tab_columns to build its list because my USERS table also exists in several other schemas and I was connecting to the one under my schema. Therefore it blew up looking for several columns that did not exist. Name your tables wisely. :-)

Bernie on Form Helpers and Showing Errors

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:04:48 +0000

Documentation Comment by Bernie on Form Helpers and Showing Errors:

The example in Displaying a List of Model Validation Errors - suggests if the object.hasErrors() to use renderPage() to display the form again with the errors. However if you use queries to populate your form because renderPage() does not use the control file none of the queries will exist so you are forced to duplicate the control file queries in the view page. This is a hassle to say the least! Is there a better way so code doesn't have to be duplicated?

Andy Bellenie to speak at Scotch on the Rocks 2013

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:15:04 +0000

Core team member Andy Bellenie is presenting at the Scotch on the Rocks conference this year, held 6-7 June in Edinburgh, Scotland.

There’s an great set of speakers lined up, including Ray Camden (Adobe), Luis Majano (Coldbox), Matt Gifford, Mike Henke, Bruce Lawson (Opera), Guust Nieuwenhuis and many more, not to mention Andy Allan and the guys from Fuzzy Orange who make it all possible.

Andy will be presenting a talk on the use of mindfulness-meditation as a technique for both professional and personal development. He’ll also be flying the flag for CFWheels at the conference and will run a BOF session for newbies and pros alike.

More info on his talk can be found here: http://www.sotr.eu/index.cfm/main/presentation/by/andy_bellenie

And the main conference site is here:
http://www.sotr.eu/

Bernie on Creating Records

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:04:15 +0000

Documentation Comment by Bernie on Creating Records:

I added this code at the top of my layout.cfm file and it works fine now! (Already had the processing directive). Sin's remark about an .ini file threw me off. Anyway its all good.

Bernie on Creating Records

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:04:28 +0000

Documentation Comment by Bernie on Creating Records:

Anyone care to expand on this answer please...

"the problem is solved by append a few lines of character setting in my.ini"

I need 8 languages in my sqlserver 2000 db. Datatype is nvarchar. I can paste directly in the cell via management studio but saving thru my application results in ???????.

ib on Installation

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:03:01 +0000

Documentation Comment by ib on Installation:

The problem must of been something with the ColdFusion I was using. It was a fresh install of CF, so I must have misted something. Anyway, when I put the contents of the cfwheels zip file on an existing server, it worked as advertised. The server has a main site with a lot of sub-directories that are their own individual site, which have nothing to do with the main site except the root URL. For example: http://www.mainsite.com/mysite/. I made the cfwheels its own sub-site, and everything worked perfectly. So the URL for the cfwheels site I created for this tutorial is http://www.mainsite.com/cfwheels/.

CF Mitrah on Column Statistics

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:02:27 +0000

Documentation Comment by CF Mitrah on Column Statistics:

How can we add group by in count function?
ex. query :
select count(emp),dept from employee group by dept

ib on Installation

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:02:37 +0000

Documentation Comment by ib on Installation:

I am trying to install CF on Wheels for the first time. It did not work. Here is what I did. Please let me know what I am missing.

1) I installed IIS7 on my Windows 7 Enterprise personal computer. When I go to http://localhost/ I get the pretty IIS7 logo page.

2) I then installed CF10. I made sure the CF Administrator worked, and the 4 default data sources checked out ok: cfartgallery, cfbookclub, cfcodeexplorer, and cfdocexample.

3) I downloaded the cfwheels.1.1.8.zip file.

4) I created a "wheels_site" directory under "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot", so it looks like "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wheels_site".

5) I unzipped the "cfwheels.1.1.8.zip" file into the "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wheels_site" directory.

6) I created a new site in IIS with the following settings:
- Site Name: Wheels Site
- Application Pool: Wheels Site
- Physical Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite (I had to create a "mysite" directory.)
- Type: http
- IP Address: All Unassigned
- Port: 80
- Host Name: localhost

7) I modified the config/settings.cfm file by un-remarking the line for set(dataSourceName=""), and changed it to <cfset set(dataSourceName="cfartgallery")>.

8) I then used IE8 to view the URL "http://localhost/";.

I did not get a Wheel welcome page. Instead, I got the error message "HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden / The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory." When I put in I got the error message "HTTP Error 404.0 - Not Found / The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable." I made sure "index.cfm" was a default document at the top of the list in IIS.

Here is some additional information I received with the 404 error.
Module: IIS Web Core
Notification: MapRequestHandler
Handler: StaticFile
Error Code: 0x80070002
Requested URL: http://localhost:80/index.cfm
Physical Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite\index.cfm
Logon Method: Anonymous
Logon User: Anonymous

jd on Beginner Tutorial: Hello Database

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:02:24 +0000

Documentation Comment by jd on Beginner Tutorial: Hello Database:

What if your application uses multiple datasources??