Allow duplicate url titles again in 4.x
Feature Requests
In EE 3.x the ability to have duplicate url titles that automatically had a number appended to them was removed. Any chance of this making it back into 4.x? When you post a lot of related content over a number of years, you can easily hit the same post titles and its tedious to have to tweak a title somewhat or manually add a number to the url title. Plus, if you submit with an already taken title, it wipes out tags set via Solspace’s tag add-on, so you have to redo that work as well.
Hi,
We don’t currently have plans to add that functionality back into ExpressionEngine, however there is a plugin here that replicates that functionality if you need it. https://github.com/willowlight/Willow-Smart-URL-Title
There’s also Simple Cloner -> https://github.com/ThorntonStuart/SimpleCloner.. I dont know if he will update to 4.X..
A belated thank you for both responses. I had hoped to avoid an add-on, since there’s always the issue of them staying updated. I guess I have to see if the Smart URL Title gets upgraded to 4 (if I am able to upgrade anyway).
Smart URL Title is compatible with both 3 and 4.
So far the problem I see here is that these only work in the CP, and do not solve the problem with a front end channel form. Please advise.
Alos, can you provide us a little detail in why this is such a big deal as to not put back into EE? Knowing there are no plans is one thing but understanding why is a bit more important.
Sorry for the delayed reply, Olomana. For front-end forms, just use the unique_url_title= parameter.
In the control panel this was purposefully removed in v3 because it allowed content authors to create very bad URLs too easily. It’s a field that 80% of the time they should be thoughtful about. For 20% that doesn’t cover, the above add-on will handle it for now. That’s why the front end has that parameter, incidentally: visitors are typically content “authors” that you do not want in control of the slug, or for which it doesn’t matter because you aren’t using that content in a way that maps to URL endpoints of your web site.
In a future version of ExpressionEngine we have plans to let site builders make it even easier for content authors have meaningful, unique slugs.
The v5 documentation states:
>if an entry with the same title already exists then the URL Title will have a number appended to the end to make it unique
Was this feature added back in or the documentation incorrect?
In my testing, a number does not get appended to the URL title.