Removal of optional hierarchical URLs - Dissappointing decision

[LadyHLG]

Let me start out by saying that I am posting this in hopes that the developers will take a moment to read and consider my comments. I understand that a project like CMSMS is a massive undertaking and for anyone willing to approach such a venture I have the utmost respect. From everything I have learned about CMSMS its seems a well written and very powerful CMS.

However, one significant change that was made to the latest version has left me very disappointed.

I currently work for a company with a very large site written almost entirely in static html. I have been researching different CMSs for months trying to find the right one to help move our site into the current century. I have tested many of them, but one of the original ones I considered and tested was CMSMS. I set up a test site and began by duplicating only a few pages of what we already have, I figured this would be a good test of the CMS's usability. From the beginning I was impressed with how easy I was able to duplicate our currents site's structure and layout with CMSMS. Our site is a well established one with good search engine rankings, so maintaining our current site structure is a must. With CMSMS I was able to do all of that quickly. While I continued to test other CMSs I continually came back to CMSMS because of its ease of use and its flexible structure, and it became obvious what my choice would be.

So this week, after months of CMS testing I began the work of converting our site, only to learn that CMSMS is no longer an option for me. Why? Because hierarchical URLs are no longer optional, but required. Apparently the option to turn these off was removed in the newest version. Which means I am not able to duplicate our site's current structure (www.oursite.com/page.html). (FYI - Someone may want to edit this wiki article as it is no longer accurate http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... ade_Simple).

My overall disappointment stems not only from the knowledge that I cannot use what I thought would be a valuable tool or that this change essentially makes CMSMS LESS flexible, but from what appears to be a major change made with very little notice to users. For anyone with a current CMSMS site wishing to stay current, their choices are to either abandon their current site structures (and loose whatever rankings they may have), hack the core CMSMS code or abandon CMSMS all together.

I can only imagine how many CMSMS users this change will effect (hundreds? thousands?). Having not actually built my site I can only sympathize with everyone currently struggling to make a choice on what to do or to find a work around.

I realize that programs change and evolve, it’s their nature, and I do realize that the developers have every right to make those changes as they see fit, but I find it disappointing that the developers of such a solid and strong piece of software would make such a significant change without any regard to their existing users. If there was any regard, frankly it was poorly shown.  A one line comment made without clarification on its impact in a forum post regarding upcoming version changes hardly seems like an adequate notification.  This change wasn’t even mentioned in the version change log! Yet its impact is NOT insignificant in how it will effect current CMSMS site owners wanting to upgrade.

I apologize for the length of this message, I debated on whether or not to even post it. But I felt it was important to voice what I was feeling. CMSMS does not exist in a vacuum, how can any software grow to meet the needs of its users without hearing what they have to say?

LadyHLG

[owr_bgld]

There is an other topic with the idea how to do this, you can read it here:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... #msg217937

[replytomk3]

I'll wait for a response from developers

[wiseguy]

When I learned about this change, I had a strong feeling that forum threads like this one would appear. I can only say that I couldn't agree more with OP, the change made CMSMS less flexible no matter how you look at it.

I'm sure that noone around here really cares about my own struggle with the hierarchy issue, but here goes. I currently have two planned projects on hold until there's a solid solution for this issue and upgrading existing installations is out of the question. When I asked about possible implications from doing a very small modification on just one line in a core file (including an example), the moderators erased my post as posting core changes is forbidden, so I'll never be able to get any comments on such a solution. What to do?

PS. I know that there's been a suggestion to change the links in menu manager from $node->url to $node->alias, but that doesn't have any effect on cms_selflink, SiteMapMadeSimple etc. DS.

[LadyHLG]

Hey wiseguy, thanks for posting your struggle. I do think its important for the developers to understand the impact this is having on current users (or possible future users).

I realized something else, anyone who designs a site using the current hierarchical url structure will be facing the same problems if, at some point in the future, they decide to change the organization structure of their site. Once they move or rearrange the pages they risk loosing search engine rankings, hacking the core or some other work around, abandon their reorganization plans or abandon CMSMS.

LadyHLG

[Ted]

I've heard and understand the concerns.  I personally don't agree with the idea, but I understand that people are trying to keep their sites running after an upgrade without requiring mod_rewrite rules to not break their SEO.

If your site is flat, then wouldn't it just be flat in the page hierarchy as well?

Anyway, the decision to remove this was my fully my call and it was the wrong one to make.  I really thought that most people wouldn't be using this anymore, since it just seems backwards to me.  Apparently, I was wrong. 

So...

1. I'll be releasing a 1.8.2 in a few days that adds the option back.  The default value will still be true, and if for some reason it doesn't show up in your config file (because you didn't run the upgrade script because it was a diff release), it can be manually added back in.  It'll also have a few reported bug fixes.  I just want some quick internal testing by the team before I cut the release.

2. If we're planning on removing something, we'll put up a forum post.  If there is enough intelligent discussion as to why it's a bad idea, then we'll rethink it.

CMSMS is a community project, though sometimes it's hard to keep that in mind when making changes.  I'll try to do better to make sure our intentions are known ahead of time.

[Ted]

Oh, and keep in mind that having use_hierarchy as false will turn off pretty URLs in modules, no matter what the settings.  Pretty URLs are inherently hierarchical and module developers count on this fact when they design their pretty url parsing schemes.  As long as that's understood, then I don't see any issues with leaving use_hierarchy in.

[LadyHLG]

Ted,
Wow, all i can say is thank-you!! You have restored my faith humanity and developers (not necessarily in that order!). Its just nice to know someone was listening!

To answer your question, technically yes, if all the pages exist off the root then yes it is flat, unfortunately how the actual pages are arranged and how the menu is arranged can be two completely different issues. And while many of us want to follow good design principles I think far too many of us are dealing with sites that were created before anyone really thought much about that kind of thing (or were created by someone is had no idea what it was).

I personally did not create the monstrosity of a site I am now trying to deal with, hundreds of pages all lumped together into the main root folder.  CSS and HTML coding that would scare even the most veteran of coders and images that have never even heard the word optimized. My job, fix it all seamlessly without effecting any of our search engine rankings.

So again, on behalf of this rather overwhelmed web admin Thank-you.

LadyHLG

[calguy1000]

IMnsHO, this use_hierarchy stuff is a crude hack.

There have been a few arguments about this 'feature' (which was never designed for the uses its being used for).

a) SEO purposes.

a.1) Better SEO ranking by using flat urls.
I've spent days doing research, and come to the conclusion that although the search engines don't like overly complex urls with lots of GET parameters, three or four (or even 5 or 6 levels of /) make absolutely no difference wrt page rankings.  Keywords in the content, matching keywords in the URL, site continuity and people linking to your site are the issues to be concerned about.

a.2) Migrating an existing site to CMSMS and wishing to maintain page rankings
Although taking advantage of this hack will allow you to migrate your site to CMSMS, but IMnsHO is not a valid reason for us to put it back.  Would J**la, Dr**al or any other cms allow you to do this in ANY way?  I'm not sure.

This problem could easily be solved with some 301 redirect rules.  For hundreds of pages, an automated mechanism could easily be written to plug in to CMSMS to handle an incoming request for my-page.html and issue a 301 redirect to the/proper/path/to/mysite.html.  and page ranking would be preserved.

b) Users typing in URLS

Users don't usually remember URLS, they bookmark them and click on them.  They don't guess URLS either.  If this was a valid concern there would be mechanisms in each CMS package to try to guess what the user meant when they typed  mysite.com/menuuuuuuuu.html or something that tried to interpret what language their browser is, match the url typed in their language to one that matches the CMS, none of this actually exists, because USERS don't as a rule try to remember URLS or guess them.

--

IMnsHO The only VALID reason why we should find a solution for this is for the sites that are currently out, available on the internet and using this 'hack'.  I still think is a relatively minor issue, because the noise related to this issue has been relatively small.  You should see the noise when a major issue pops in like the performance issue I introduced into CMSMS 1.8.  Certainly the number of sites using this hack less than 10% of installed sites.

I have discussed with Ted, and he agreed (prior to posting the above post) that a good solution would be to:
a) Create a mechanism (event) in CMSMS that would allow modifying incoming requests (similar to what mod-rewrite does)
b) Create a new module (not distributed with the core) that handles the above event, and detects incoming URLS without /'s in them, finds the intended alias, and issues a 301 redirect to the TRUE url.  New installs would not need this module, infact only installs using the use_hierarchy=false mechanism would.  This module would slowly convert any incoming request for OLD non hierarchical URLS to the URL mechanism that the system supported.  (additionally this module could help with situations where some users switched the URL mechanism AFTER the site was live).

This use_hierarchy=false issue is all about nothing.  It was implemented A LONG TIME AGO, poorly, has caused lots of problems and for IMnsHO invalid reasons.  However, we all learn as we go along, and we thought it was a good idea at the time.  As well, modules don't support it (what's the difference between 2010-07-29-this-is-a-blog-article.html and 2010/07/209/this-is-a-blog-article.html as far as SEO is concerned?  Answer: NONE).

As well, there's a reasonable solution planned for existing sites to migrate to the proper layout without having to lose page ranking.

Let the flame wars begin.

[wiseguy]

Whether to use a hierarchical or non-hierarchical URL structure is debated on most SEO forums and I don't think we'll find the ultimate answer on that by further discussing it here. To get the answer you simply need to try out what works best for your sites. From my own experience I would say that the less irrelevant words in the url, the better both for ranking and clickthrough rate.

When you enter the CMSMS website, the top listed feature is called "SEO Friendly URLs". Then to the question what is the definition of a SEO Friendly CMS. In my world it's when the webmasters can decide what kind of URL structure they want to use on their sites, as well as a bunch of other SEO related stuff like title, meta description, header tags and so on. This is not something that should be dictated and limited by the CMS itself, unless there really is a very good technical reason behind it. And even if it is, further development should strive towards flexibility. Other popular CMSes have plugins that gives the webmasters freedom to choose for themselves.

To get even more flexibility when it comes to the URL structure, I would like to see the option to choose URL structure on a page by page basis. Anyway, I believe asking for this feature is to push my luck a little and I'm perfectly happy with having the use_hierarchy=false option back

[LadyHLG]

No flaming here! Just a couple of, what I hope are, thoughtful and respectful comments...

a.2) Migrating an existing site to CMSMS and wishing to maintain page rankings
Although taking advantage of this hack will allow you to migrate your site to CMSMS, but IMnsHO is not a valid reason for us to put it back.  Would J**la, Dr**al or any other cms allow you to do this in ANY way?  I'm not sure.

J**la, Dr**al definitely wouldn't. Its is exactly why I did not chose either of those two big CMS's (Ok, that along with about a million other reasons that I'm sure you guys have heard before, and yes there is at least one other CMS that I know of that does offer this).  But then why is it so bad for CMSMS to offer something that those other CMSs do not. I can only see that as a good thing. There are so many designers, developers and web admins out there looking for a manageable CMS solution, and far too much of what is out there is simply too bloated, too complicated or so inflexible that it makes them a nightmare to use. From everything I have seen CMSMS has managed to offer so much and still maintain an amazing amount of flexibility. I would hope that is something you will continue to strive towards (with perhaps a part of that being flexibility in url structure  ).

I have discussed with Ted, and he agreed (prior to posting the above post) that a good solution would be to:
a) Create a mechanism (event) in CMSMS that would allow modifying incoming requests (similar to what mod-rewrite does)
b) Create a new module (not distributed with the core) that handles the above event, and detects incoming URLS without /'s in them, finds the intended alias, and issues a 301 redirect to the TRUE url.

Great! I look forward to both of these developments, and thank-you for them in advance.

Oh, and something I forgot to say in my previous post,
Regardless of my disappointment in the changes and my personal website dilemma, the original reason I felt compelled to post had more to do with how this change was implemented. That to me was of considerable concern. It left me with some doubts as to whether CMSMS would be a good choice for any future projects. Not knowing if in the future something similar would occur.
Thank-you for not over looking this point and for providing a clear and intelligent solution for future changes of this kind.

LadyHLG

[spike]

Have read this through a couple of times now,
must say I'm not too sure whether it's actually coming back or not. ?
I would certainly appreciate it, I'm heavily dependent on statistical evaluation of pages for advertising purposes and non-hierarchial URL's are significantly easier for me to evaluate. My site is not hierarchially complicated but has so far grown to around 350 pages so two levels from root are at present necessary. Having the choice to make it "flat" is a distinct advantage.
Here's hoping - gruss - spike

[baresi]

I would add my 0.5 cents and say the reason I have something without hierarchy is because of simplicity and very little about SEO.

To be perfectly honest the only reason 'hierarchy' came into question at all in this large site is because I had to make the back end as fast as possible so I added sections otherwise I/we didn't see any point in adding another level to the site. It is an encyclopedia kind of site and one of the first decisions that were made was that site.com/entry.php makes the most sense (adding anything to it like site.com/subtopic/entry.php would be adding one unnecessary layer. Unnecessary for a human, for example which subtopic a particular entry belongs, that is the content in the page would make it clear what the entry is all about not the URL. Also Content will take care of SEO any way in my opinion, I am never really that crazy about SEO tactics)

So I hope the the above described by Ted and calguy1000 allow for a continuation of this.

[LeisureLarry]

I´ve loved the work of the developers for a long time and was a great fan of this CMS, but this changed with taking our flexibility.

I´ve to totally sign the posting of wiseguy, the user should have the possibility to choose. I don´t need any module which makes use of use_hierarchy=true and I have something without hierarchy because of simplicity (as baresi). Changing my URL structure (automated or not) won´t be an option to me (downgrading and after that migrating to another CMS would be; which would be a very sad moment for me).

Teds first reaction was really great, the default of this setting isn´t really important for me.
@calguy1000: Crude hack or not, leave the use of CMSms as it was before 1.8 SIMPLE and FLEXIBLE.

Sorry for my bad english
LeisureLarry

[cyberman]

I´ve to totally sign the posting of wiseguy, the user should have the possibility to choose.

Second that!

The pro user should decide by himself what seo strategy he want to use.