Friendly URLs with querystring params for articles and galleries

[might-e]

Hi,

A little bit of an introduction: about 10 years ago I created a website using modx revolution for a non-profit sports club. Since creating it I only did CMS and package updates and sometimes small adjustments to templates/chunks. I haven’t worked with modx apart from that. Lately I have been doing some updates and want to make it near perfect in regards to SEO scores, lighthouse etc.

One of the issues I am having now is that pagination of news (articles) and image galleries (gallery) use query string parameters. I would like to make it so that the page number (for articles) and gallery photo album ID becomes part of the friendly URL eg. /news/2 rather than news?page=2.

I have found this topic:

Query param as a part of SEO url?

Greetings. I was wondering if I could use a query param as a part of SEO url, e.g., I want www.site.com/catalog/wine?type=red transform to www.site.com/catalog/wine/red, I’ve tried adding this to .htaccess: RewriteRule ^(.)/(.)$ index.php?q=$1&type=$2 [L,QSA] Actually it’s the latest version of rewrite rule I’ve tried, I’ve also tried several others like this one: RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/catalog/wine/$ /catalog/wine?type=$1 [L] But none of them worked. Environment MODX 2.7.2, Apache 2.4.

I am now wondering what the best way is to achieve this. The topic mentioned above suggests using an extra or customizing the .htaccess file. Looking at the readme of the extra I am not sure if it is intended for my use case?
I am also unsure if customizing the .htaccess is the way to go.

Apart from the topic above I am struggling to find good resources, which I find weird because I don’t think my goal is unique. Can someone point me in the right direction?

[halftrainedharry]

Extras that have this functionality in MODX usually work as follows:

• There is a plugin that runs on the event OnPageNotFound
• In the plugin, the code checks if the beginning of the request URL path matches certain resource-aliases.
• With $modx->sendForward(...) the request is redirected to the correct resource.

You could write such a plugin yourself. Here is some sample code:

Check urls against unauthorized 404 page

This doesn’t work with a snippet. It has to be a plugin. (The plugins are located in the same “Elements” tab below the snippets.) Then in the plugin code, check the value of the request parameter q ($_REQUEST['q']). If the parameter has the format gallery/photo-x, use the function $modx->sendForward() to load the gallery page (and maybe also set $_REQUEST/$_GET['some_parameter_name'] to the value of “photo-x”, so that value can then be used on the gallery page to load the correct image). So…

You could use the extra CustomRequest, if you don’t want to code yourself.

Or use a RewriteRule in the .htaccess file (which I personally don’t like as it’s hard to debug).

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Also, if you use pdoPage for the paging (part of the pdoTools extra), then I believe there is built-in option for friendly page URLs.

[might-e]

Thanks!

I have now solved it with CustomRequest for all paging setups as well as gallery, works like a charm . Was really easy and and it’s just configuration, I suppose htaccess would have better performance, but this way it’s just configuration in modx which seems cleaner to me.