What is your opinion about umlauts (ä, ö, ü) in the URL?

[PetersOtto]

Hello Community!
I realized that the Blog extension does not convert the umlauts (ä, ö, ü) in the domain automatically. I feel not good with that. Is that no longer a problem?
I know it is possible to use TitleSlug ( #326) to customize the URL

Title: Blogseite an der Küste
TitleSlug: Blogseite an der Kueste
Published: 2018-05-27 12:00:00
Template: blog

However, it is not so easy to explain that a customer.
Better would be a automatically change from ä to ae.
What is your opinion?

[schulle4u]

Most web servers and browsers shouldn't have a problem parsing umlauts nowadays, however as an internet child of the late 90s and early 2000s I personally prefer clean URLs in my projects too. 🙂 Although I would vote for a better URL normalisation, I don't see a problem in manually setting the TitleSlug. In fact there are even more title settings to control how page titles are displayed throughout the website, the slug is just one of them.

Another approach to automate URL creation could be to use placeholders and patterns for the TitleSlug setting. Here is an example content/shared/page-new-blog.md which uses the entries date as part of the URL.

---
Title: Blog page
TitleSlug: blog-@date
Published: @datetime
Author: @username
Layout: blog
Tag: Example
---
This is a new blog page.

Now the TitleSlug will be prefilled with the publication date and a text pattern upon page creation. This is just an example, the possibilities are nearly endless.

[glow12121]

Most web servers and browsers shouldn't have a problem parsing umlauts nowadays, however as an internet child of the late 90s and early 2000s I personally prefer clean URLs in my projects too.

I agree. Latin letters with accents and umlauts are a bad idea for URLs, just like Cyrillic, Arabic, Asian, or any other alphabets, other than plain English.

[PetersOtto]

Oh, yes! The possibility to work with placeholders was not in my mind. Thank you!
However I think for SEO would it good to have the Title in the domain.
Do you know if shortcodes would be possible in the Header (TitleSlug)?
Something like that:

Title: Blogseite an der Küste
TitleSlug: [ChangeTitleUmlauts]
Published: 2018-05-27 12:00:00
Template: blog

[PetersOtto]

Oh, great! Now I have enough solutions :) Thx!

[GiovanniSalmeri]

If you prefer a built-in function (which could be not installed in your version of PHP!), see https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

An example of use (and important remark) is in comment https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php#74101

[PetersOtto]

Thank you @GiovanniSalmeri, I will have a closer look to it!

[markseuffert]

Maybe someone wants to improve on #372, add more languages, make and publish a transliterate extension?

All it needs now is someone to volunteer. 😀

[PetersOtto]

I would do/try that but I think my skills in php, yellow API and github are a lot to low...
I will work me through your documentation about "helping you" and come back to you.

[PetersOtto]

This works fine for me (VERSION = "0.8.19"):

1. put the TitleSlug: in the Header and let it empty.

Title: Blogseite an der Küste
TitleSlug:
Published: 2018-05-27 12:00:00
Template: blog

2. Create a umlaute.php in the extension folder with the following code. Have a look here: How to transliterate from UTF8 to ASCII? #372 Thank you @schulle4u and @markseuffert

<?php

class YellowUmlaute {
    const VERSION = "0.8.19";
    public $yellow;         //access to API

    // Handle initialisation
    public function onLoad($yellow) {
        $this->yellow = $yellow;
    }
    
    // Handle content file editing
    public function onEditContentFile($page, $action, $email) {
        if (!$page->isExisting("titleSlug")) {
            $replaceData = $this->getReplaceData();
            $titleSlug = str_replace(array_keys($replaceData), array_values($replaceData), $page->get("title"));
            $titleSlug = preg_replace("/[^\pL\d\-\_\ ]/u", "-", $titleSlug);
            $page->rawData = $this->yellow->toolbox->setMetaData($page->rawData, "titleSlug", $titleSlug);
        }
    }
    
    // Return text replace data, UTF8 to ASCII
    public function getReplaceData() {
        return array(
            "Ä" => "AE", "ä" => "ae", "Ü" => "UE", "ü" => "ue","Ö" => "OE", "ö" => "oe",
        );
    }
}

[IngoBelka]

Only a thought, what about to add "ß" =>"sz".

[schulle4u]

Ss is the common way to rewrite it.

[IngoBelka]

Sorry for the little joke. ;-)