It would be handy to have the ability to control how urls are built within the admin UI.

Currently the only option for url generator is hardcoded to use the category slugs. However some sites have already named their products and categories with their preferred keywords, effectively gaining the same benefit as url category slugs. For those installs, it makes little sense to do both and it risks blowing the 300-char url limit.

It took only a few lines of code to rewrite the url generator to produce the same urls we had in Able Gold. Thank you for designing it that way. Making that controllable via an admin setting would make for an elegant solution. In fact, you could even add a few other url/slug options for the admin to chooose from, sort of like how Wordpress does it. Set the desired url format, fire the RebuildUrls() routine and it's done.

Hi Judy,

Hope all is well. I'm really curious about something, since this is not the first time this issue is brought up. Why not do the manipulation through Microsoft Excel or, better yet, Microsoft Access?

20 years ago, when data structures was pretty much proprietary, I could understand, but data is interchangeable today. It is so easy to manipulate this outside of Ablecommerce, I'm just curious if I'm missing something?

There are only two columns that need to be manipulated, and you can always back up to the same table structure if need be.

Would appreciate your input.

Thanks,
-Ray

Thank you for your feedback.

The problem is, everyone wants something different. Different people want to default to a specific pattern, and there's only so much Ablecommerce can do to implement any of these changes.

A simple search and replace in Excel is all that's needed, nothing complicated at all. The main point I'm trying to get across is, there are many tools that exist today that are beyond the limits of the developers at Ablecommerce. I would prefer that they concentrate on bug fixes and new features, as opposed to trying to create functions and abilities that already exist using other tools. Again, just my opinion.

The import and export feature of Ablecommerce, except for a few bugs that can exist in certain SKUs, is absolutely outstanding. I'm going to go on record and say it's even better than Magento. I'm sure that Mike would love to hear that.

Since ID is what should be used instead of SKU anyway for updates, the importing update feature is top-notch in this platform.

I think people just underestimate the power of Excel, not to mention the power of MS Access for these type of purposes.

Now, I will grant you this, especially as an enhance feature for a new version. The ability, in the backend under admin, to create a template based on placeholders that will automatically format the URL the way a user would like. It doesn't have to be complicated, but something like this:

[WebSite-URL] + "\" + [2nd category level] + "-" [Product SKU]

Just a thought.