Removal of optional hierarchical URLs - Dissappointing decision

[Ted]

1.8.2 is released.  It puts use_hierarchy back as well as some bug fixes.  Blog post incoming...

We're listening, we swear. 

[wiseguy]

1.8.2 is released.  It puts use_hierarchy back as well as some bug fixes.  Blog post incoming...

We're listening, we swear. 

Big thanks to Ted & the crew for listening to mere mortals

If you decide to remove the use_hierarchy setting in the future, please make sure there's a supported way for using non-hierarchical urls. Just to make an obvious example, if you happen to have the domain flights.to, you would prefer to use an url like flights.to/madrid rather than e.g. flights.to/destinations/spain/madrid. I agree that hierarchical urls work perfectly for many projects, but it should be up to the webmaster which url structure to use for each project.

[LadyHLG]

Just adding my thanks and to echo wiseguy's sentiment on flexibility in url structure.

LadyHLG

[spike]

Must also add my thanks for the re-inclusion for the Flat Earth supporters.
It was a nerve wracking two week experience in the land of hierarchies with broken external links, bookmarks and missing indexed pages, not to forget the inability to move pages around within the site without altering the URLs.
I trust we'll not be left hanging in the future.
gruss - spike
P.S. A big thanks to LeisureLarry and Andiministrator for helping me over the hump with their work-arounds.

[LeisureLarry]

My thanks to the dev-team

[LadyHLG]

I'm hoping someone from the design team could give us a definitive answer into the future of optional hierarchical URLs.

With the current update it is again possible to "turn off" hierarchical urls but where will things go from here? I think its important for anyone currently planning projects to know if future versions will still have optional hierarchical urls or if its something that will definitely be phased out with a hierarchical url structure required.

LadyHLG

[Ted]

We'll make sure that there are ways in the module API to write a module to duplicate this functionality.  And warn people ahead of time, as well.

[calguy1000]

I'm hoping someone from the design team could give us a definitive answer into the future of optional hierarchical URLs.

Since 1.9 is currently in active beta.. and we've done alot of work towards making a completely flexible URL handling mechanism (this is gonna be a killer feature), the use_hierarchy stuff has been made in my opinion completely redundant.

1.9 will allow you to explicitly specify a path to a specific page.  You can make it as simple, or as complex as you want (currently only ascii URL safe characters sorry).  The urls must be unique across the whole system (including news articles, and other modules that support this mechanism).  There are options in the global settings to allow creating page urls automatically from the page alias, or from the alias hierarchy... but these are essentially just shortcuts.  The page_url functionality is completely independent from the page aliases.

This makes the use_hierarchy stuff completely irrelevant in my opinion, and as you know it was replaced in 1.8.2 until we had a good replacement solution.  This is it. 

The only issue I see is handling existing sites.  For that I propose that we do some modifications to the upgrade script to ensure that if use_hierarchy is OFF, and pretty urls are on, that the page alias is copied into the page_url field as a good initial starting point.

Thoughts and opinions?

[Nullig]

I think this is a great solution.

Nullig

[Jos]

the use_hierarchy stuff has been made in my opinion completely redundant.

I don't need it and I'm not going to use it, but I like the new system, it offers great flexibility.

But I think it is only completely redundant if there is a checkbox in the global options tab that will fill the new url-field automatically with the page alias when one creates a new page.

[calguy1000]

But I think it is only completely redundant if there is a checkbox in the global options tab that will fill the new url-field automatically with the page alias when one creates a new page.

There is.

[Jos]

whoops, I see now you mentioned it explicitely in your first post, I should have read it better  :-[

Then use_hierarchy is completely redundant indeed  8)

[jmcgin51]

Then use_hierarchy is completely redundant indeed  8)

agreed - two thumbs up to the dev team for the custom URL implementation!!