A few changes

[Benjamin]

I spent some time last night and made the following changes:

• Added Google Custom Search to the header
• Changed how page titles are rendered for SE readability and ranking
• Removed text from pages used by bots to locate this forum (to post spam)
• Changed the height of Syntax boxes
• A few other minor changes

I would like to also have the forum topic URL's changed so that they are the topic title and post id. If anyone wants to tackle that it would be great.

[Jonah Bron]

Added Google Custom Search to the header

Lovin' it.

I would like to also have the forum topic URL's changed so that they are the topic title and post id.

Don't quite understand...

[Benjamin]

A topic url would be changed from the current format:

http://forums.devnetwork.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=130714

To:

http://forums.devnetwork.net/a-few-changes/post/130714/

[Jonah Bron]

Ahhh, I get it.

[pickle]

Not digging the ads - any way to get rid of them? Could we say we're a non-profit?

Good work though.

[Benjamin]

We can pay to have them removed. Actually, I haven't even seen them because I use adblock anyway.

[Jonah Bron]

You mean the ads on the search results? Same here, I didn't know they were there until you mentioned it and I disabled Adblock. Don't suppose Devnet gets anything from them?

[califdon]

A topic url would be changed from the current format:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=130714

To:

a-few-changes/post/130714/

Isn't there a problem with non-unique post titles? It's pretty hard to avoid duplicating an old topic title that was used years ago. You know, like "HELP!!!"

Of course, maybe that's the way to collect 'em all in one place.

[Benjamin]

Well that's why we have to put the post id in the url.

[Jonah Bron]

Anyway, that should be a simple URL rewrite, right? Tested, this seems to work:

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Hide ]

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Show ]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^[^/]+/post/(\d+)/?$ /viewtopic.php?t=$1

Not sure if it might conflict with other things though. You can speculate all you want, but until you check it out for yourself, you never know

[Benjamin]

Yeah I'll need to go through the site and change these links where they appear and also add 301 redirects for the old posts.

I'm curious why you are rewriting to posting.php rather than viewtopic.php though.

[Jonah Bron]

I am too... how did I do that?

[ok]

I think that the stackoverflow URL is better then the one Benjamin suggested. It uses the first part as a domain like forum,topic,post etc, the second part as an id and the last part is for SEO.
For example:

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Hide ]

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Show ]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7380103/can-i-define-an-outlet-in-a-nib-without-specifying-a-controller

So:

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Hide ]

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Show ]

http://forums.devnetwork.net/a-few-changes/post/130714/

Becomes:

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Hide ]

Syntax: [ Download ] [ Show ]

http://forums.devnetwork.net/post/130714/a-few-changes

I think that putting it that way is better since it is very easy for users to find the title (as it is always placed last).

[Vegan]

all the search engines can easily work with phpBB and fine the relevant content

same applies for all of the other popular forum packages