hi,
I'm interested in taking a part as a student in GSoC 2008. And, here's my idea..
One of the inconvenience things within moodle is its URL. moodle still uses native URL which is not human readable.
so, i'd like to develop a plugin that enable moodle's URL to be rewriten using apache mod_rewrite.
i think this plugin will be very useful, since rewriting the URL will result a better ranking in the search engine result pages
any suggestions?
Do you have any evidence that it will result in a better search ranking? Note that most Moodle pages are not open to search engines anyway.
actually i don't have any evidence to prove my statement above. but, since most search engine crawlers prefers to index clean URLs rather than native URL (which contains ampersands and equal signs), i believe that it will gain more popularity in the search engine result page.
thanks to remind me that not all moodle's pages are open for public. but i think we can anticipate that by a "robot.txt" file in the root directory of moodle site or a "robot meta tag" in every page which are not open to search engine.
and, i think it must be another "home work" for us (if we think that it's important to hide some page from "prying eyes").
thanks to remind me that not all moodle's pages are open for public. but i think we can anticipate that by a "robot.txt" file in the root directory of moodle site or a "robot meta tag" in every page which are not open to search engine.
and, i think it must be another "home work" for us (if we think that it's important to hide some page from "prying eyes").
Regardless of search engine stuff, I've often thought that it would be good to have this. It would mean being able to give human-readable URLs for your courses on written materials for one thing.
For courses you can do this:
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?name=Using Moodle
or http://moodle.org/course/view.php?idnumber=USING001
It would be pretty easy (too easy for a GSOC project) to put in a redirect for that one page like http://moodle.org/showcourse/USING001 (but much much harder to do it for every page - lots and lots of hardcoded exceptions).
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?name=Using Moodle
or http://moodle.org/course/view.php?idnumber=USING001
It would be pretty easy (too easy for a GSOC project) to put in a redirect for that one page like http://moodle.org/showcourse/USING001 (but much much harder to do it for every page - lots and lots of hardcoded exceptions).
We were just discussing doing something similar for Course Categories as the top level ones correspond to entire departments (e.g. Physics) for us and in 1.9 you can edit the Category description with arbritrary HTML to easily create a nice landing page. However the links are a bit opaque and tricky to write/read/describe and while manually adding rewrites would work it'd be a bit brittle.
Note also that the idnumber example fails with an error if you have two courses with the same idnumber, I just filed bug MDL-14084 on that.
Note also that the idnumber example fails with an error if you have two courses with the same idnumber, I just filed bug MDL-14084 on that.
actually, what i want to do is create a rewrite patern which is simmiliar to the breadcrumb in the top of every page.
for example:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93295 (this page)
into:
http://moodle.org/using-moodle/forums/student-projects/gsoc-moodle-apache-mod_rewrite/
and of course i won't do it one-by-one for every page. i'd rather make an automated rewrite mechanism.
for example:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93295 (this page)
into:
http://moodle.org/using-moodle/forums/student-projects/gsoc-moodle-apache-mod_rewrite/
and of course i won't do it one-by-one for every page. i'd rather make an automated rewrite mechanism.
Interesting. Please keep this discussion updated how its going.