Paid Help - Make Categories Lowercase and Remove "category" within URL

[trueMarketing]

Hi,
This should be a relatively easy way for someone to make some extra cash. I was told that one of these things was already built into the latest version of Pligg (lowercase category names in URL), which I downloaded a couple of days ago - Version 1.0.0 RC4 | 03.30.2009. I cannot seem to get it to work:

Lowercase category names in URL. Example:
http://www.examplesite.com/category/Blue-Widgets/some-post-here/

Should be:
http://www.examplesite.com/category/blue-widgets/some-post-here/

Second thing we need: To reduce the # of unnecessary sub-directories deep, I'd like to also remove the /category/ from within the URL, so taking the above example one step further, the final URL should look like this:

http://www.examplesite.com/blue-widgets/some-post-here/

We already have Pligg installed in a sub-directory and everything is running smoothly except the few things needed above. I'm sure that someone who knows a bit more about Pligg than I do can make this happen in 15-30 minutes or less.

I'll pay $100 to whomever can do this for me today via Paypal.

IM me on skype at: seoposition
IM me on Gtalk at: brian(dot)gilley@gmail.com

Thanks!

[Yankidank]

Give me an hour and I'll post a solution for you on this thread. I can tell you now though that category urls should be lowercase already. Check the generated .htaccess code provided at the bottom of the admin category page and make sure that they are all lowercase and copied into your .htaccess file. Example provided below:

RewriteRule ^(all|news|category-2|category-3|category-4|category-5)/([^/]+)/?$ story.php?title=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(all|news|category-2|category-3|category-4|category-5)/?$ ?category=$1 [L]

[trueMarketing]

Nice! That would rock and you would rock by posting a solution!

I checked my generated .htaccess code provided at the bottom of the admin category page and it is this instead:

RewriteRule ^(all|Search-Marketing|Link-Building|Paid-Search)/([^/]+)/?$ story.php?title=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(all|Search-Marketing|Link-Building|Paid-Search)/?$ ?category=$1 [L]

So, no. These are not getting rewritten to lowercase for categories. Also, downloading my .htaccess file after checking the above output in the admin category page I noticed this was included:

##### You can find the below lines pre-made for you in the category management section of the admin panel ######
RewriteRule ^(all|News)/([^/]+)/?$ story.php?title=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(all|News)/?$ ?category=$1 [L]

So, I guess my question is do all new categories require me to go to the category admin page each time and grab a new copy of the output .htaccess code, then manually replace it in the .htaccess file, making sure all categories are lowercase?

I thought this was all done automatically?

Thanks again, I feel like I'm getting somewhere now!

[trueMarketing]

Something must not be working right with my version. I just copied this into the .htaccess file, making all categories lowercase) manually:

RewriteRule ^(all|search-marketing|link-building|paid-search)/([^/]+)/?$ story.php?title=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(all|search-marketing|link-building|paid-search)/?$ ?category=$1 [L]

But in my category admin page, they are all still being generated as uppercase whenever I add a new category:

RewriteRule ^(all|Search-Marketing|Link-Building|Paid-Search)/([^/]+)/?$ story.php?title=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(all|Search-Marketing|Link-Building|Paid-Search)/?$ ?category=$1 [L]

Of course, creating any new categories as lowercase to start with fixes everything, except for the fact that the category dropdown menu for selecting a category for a story does not look professional and the Title tag and perhaps other places show the category name as all lowercase. Boohoo.

[Yankidank]

When creating a category two values are inserted into the MySQL field. The first is the category name. This is the normal, unedited version of the category. It can include spaces, capital letters, and special characters like an ampersand (&). The second field is the category safe name. This is in all lower case letters, and spaces and special characters are converted into dashes. An example of this is below or the attached image.

category_name = category_safe_name
Category 1 = category-1

My advice is that you manually replace the capital letters from the generated code whenever you add a new category. The version of Pligg that I am using is already un-capitalizing the letters, but I'm not sure if that's what RC4 did. You may want to grab the latest SVN version if you are still in the beginning stage.

I am about to start looking into removing the /category/ from the url.

[trueMarketing]

That's one hell of a workaround. I grabbed the latest SVN, updated my site, and still have uppercase letters in the category names within the URLs. So, I just did what you said and manually altered the category_safe_name within the DB. That worked, but I wonder what problems this method will pose when upgrading to a newer version of Pligg or other modifications?

Seems like this should definitely be added within Pligg as a default and stable option. I don't know of many people or webmasters who have sites with all lowercase letters via mod_rewrite who wants to screw that format up with the random uppercase letters produced from Pligg categories. Maybe that's just me though ;-)

Thanks though for this. I'll wait to hear back from you on the removal of /category/ in the URLs as well.

[Yankidank]

I'm not sure why your site isn't changing uppercase to lowercase, but it's supposed to do just that.

I've come up with a solution for removing /category/, but it currently breaks the sort feature. I need a bit more time and I will publish the changes on this thread.

[Techkr]

I've come up with a solution for removing /category/, but it currently breaks the sort feature. I need a bit more time and I will publish the changes on this thread.

I would like to know too,
I just go to check my pligg site and see error when click on sort menu. But my story url and category url still woking with no word "Category"

[Yankidank]

Right now I have it down so that it removes /category/, but it breaks the sort links and the upcoming category pagination links need fixed. I'll probably figure out how to get the pagination corrected but thats where I'm going to stop with this since I don't find the sort feature that useful.

[pliggrich]

Just done a brand new install with the latest version and it is not changing my categories to lower case either. Looking forward to a solution and REEEEEally looking forward to the remove category from url fix!