Acts As Seo Friendly

A Ruby on Rails plugin that swaps the commonly used numeric :id based URLs (/posts/34), for more useful & human readable URLs like (/posts/34-my-latest-spoon-collection)

Author

http://www.chrisfarms.com

Usage

declare a field in your model that you wish to use for the textual
slug with the acts_as_friendly_param macro.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_friendly_param :name
end

That's it!

The result of the Post#name method will be appended to the URL

helpers like:

<%= link_to 'view post', :action => 'show', :id => @post %>

will produce URLs like

/posts/12-monkies-are-coming

Unicode Concerns

Although many unicode characters are actually valid in URIs, the
rails url helpers are quite strict with their escaping and you can
end up with some pretty ugly urls.
It is also good for searching if e and é are treated equally.

So.. friendly-param will try to tidy up the following:

• remove any accents from characters
• strip out any plain-crazy characters (Omega, Pi etc)
• convert spaces into hyphens

SEO Concerns

To prevent multiple URLs pointing to the same resource, and having
a negative effect on search-engine ranking, friendly-url will
use 301 redirects on any ambiguous GET requests.

The following behavior should be expected

• trailing slashes will be removed from URLs
• requests for resources using incorrect slugs will be redirected to the the correct URL
• if the routes file is drastically modified then any old URLs that still work will be redirected to there new equivalent.

Gotchas

Once a model has is acting as a friendly param then #find will not
act the same for String/Fixnum objects.

Post.find('8')  =>> RecordMoved Error 
Post.find(8)         =>> OK

Ensure that you use don't call #id directly when using url_for

eg.

<%= link_to 'show animal', :action => 'show', :id => @animal %>

NOT

<%= link_to 'show animal', :action => 'show', :id => @animal.id %>

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly