are you talking about the permalink url?
Thats "small" for many reasons, the most basic being being kind to your readers. long urls suck and are difficult to remember.

Stephen,

I don't think that you need to edit any files.

When you make a post, you choose a "Title", which can be whatever you want. If you just save it, as is, b2evo will internally modify it (converting spaces to underscores and any special characters), using this (sometimes shortened, sometimes undesirable) "thing" as a URL title.

HOWEVER, in the Edit window, you can define your own "URL title", choosing some better variation (or something completely different) from the post "Title".

But ... make certain that you've got your back office settings (Settings Tab -> General Tab -> Link Options Area -> "Use extra-path info" checked ... and "permalink type" radio buttoned to "Post called up by its URL title" ... or you won't get the "URL Title" in the link.

Hope this helps.

IF (per chance) you wanted to increase the number of characters ALLOWED in a URL title, you probably could do this by using myPhpAdmin to modify the length of the "post_urltitle" (which is currently 50 and in the "evo_posts" table) ... to something longer.

Note ... I don't recommend this. Like Whoo says ... be kind to the readers. Keep your URL Title brief.

What do we do? Generally, I make a "Title" and let b2evo pick its own "URL Title" ... 90% of the time, this is fine. For the other 10%, I override the URL Title in the Edit window and pick something of my choosing.

Again ... hope this helps.

Cheers,

stk :D

whoo wrote:

are you talking about the permalink url?
Thats "small" for many reasons, the most basic being being kind to your readers. long urls suck and are difficult to remember.

Are you're kidding? I don't know anybody able to remember a blog's whole title, especially since it includes the post's date! In fact, I don't really understand the purpose of the date inside the URL, since titles are unique anyway...

StephenR wrote:

What file(s) do I need to edit in order for the complete title of a post to appear in the URL?

That won't answer to your question, but search engines don't care a lot of very common words such as "a" or "the". Try to find [url=http://www.google.fr/search?q=a+bird]a bird on Google[/url]: it won't even highlight the "a" keyword you've given.

My sisted doesn't even try to type hotmail.com to check her mail: she types hotmail into the Google Toolbar. A lot of people don't even display the address of the pages they visit, a lot of people believe the .com extension is complicated and useless... I can't imagine anybody trying to type a blog's URL directly... So I don't really understand why you want to extend the size of your title... (I believe it's a table databse limitation, in fact...)

My own blogging experience shows people access a direct post in the following situations:

• they come from Google;

• they come from any other search engine;

• they come from a comment of mine on another blog where I've inserted (a) link(s) to a given post of my blog;

• they come from a trackback of mine on another blog;

[*]some very rare people directly link to a given post of my blog.[/list:u]You should try to use the most relevant keywords for your post in the URL without trying to write sentences. Write human-oriented text in the title and your post itself.

kwa wrote:

whoo wrote:

are you talking about the permalink url?
Thats "small" for many reasons, the most basic being being kind to your readers. long urls suck and are difficult to remember.

Are you're kidding? I don't know anybody able to remember a blog's whole title, especially since it includes the post's date! In fact, I don't really understand the purpose of the date inside the URL, since titles are unique anyway...

umm.. no I am not.

perhaps I should have clarified.

I dont expect that anyone would remember a permalink, were it small or not.
However, IN GENERAL, long urls suck, and are difficult to remember.

Thanks for the info gentleman. Just need to shorten my titles down a little...I can get a little windy :)

YO ... I'm just following up on this because it crossed my desk today. (Everything below is for a DAWN installation .. untested in anything else.)

I have MORE information to add, which will be of use to people wanting to do allow longer (nice) URL's.

QUESTION: Where I can change the maximum allowed length (in characters) of the permalinks to postings?

There appear to be three possible solutions: :|

• EASY :D ... Don't use really long URL's (this isn't really doing your visitors any favors. URLs (ideally) should be easy to remember (and unique).

You can specify a long title ( e.g., Watch Me Kill The President! (Jan 13) "Ridiculous In America" ), but then a SHORTER "URL Title" (e.g., killing_george_bush). There is a spot for this in the Back Office. You don't HAVE TO use your long title as the default "URL Title", it can be shorter ... much shorter (which is what I do, when I have a long title). I recommend this (easy) solution over anything else. HOWEVER ... some search engines parse the title for words .. (not sure how they handle the underscores) but you *might* end up with better rankings with a long (and descriptive) title.

• MAYBE? :) ... If your server can handle "clean urls" (or "extra-path info" (back office ... settings --> Link Options --> "Use extra-path into" (you should have selected -> "Post called up by its URL title" (which is recommended)).

TRY ... "Post on archive page, located by it's title" ... You may find this works for you. (It gives you the full title as the URL and no hacking).

• THE HACK :| ... There are THREE changes you have to make to enable really LONG urls. (BUT ... like anything ... it can be done). Here's what you do ...

• You have to modify your Database .. specifically, the evo_posts table and the post_urltitle field. Using myphpAdmin .. change the structure of the field from varchar 50 to varchar 250 (how many characters it allows).

• That's only part of it. Also, you need to allow more chars in the backoffice EDIT form (which by default, is 50). To do this ... edit /admin/_edit_form.php. Around line 250 or so, you find the following and need to change it to:

<input type="text" name="post_urltitle" id="post_urltitle" value="<?php echo format_to_output( $post_urltitle, 'htmlattr' ); ?>" size="40" maxlength="250" tabindex="20" />

(The key is maxlength ... it's orginally set to 50, just like the varchar .. but open it up to 250).

• That's all well and good, but you know what? Changing those two things did NOTHING for me (and I figured it would). SO ... I had to do some digging, but what I eventually discovered was that the [length of the OVERALL URL is set somewhere else] ... this includes EVERYTHING ... http://yoursite.com/blah/blah/blah/__(PLUS)_the_url_title

SO ... you need to edit b2evocore/_functions_bposts.php. Look around line 314 for the following and bump it up from 100 to 500 ...

$urlbase = substr( $matches[1], 0, 500 );

[/list:u]BOOM ... you now have SUPER LONG URLS[/list:u] I hope this helps. -stk www.randsco.com

Cool STK you're on my SEO wavelength. TY.

stk wrote:

YO ... I'm just following up on this because it crossed my desk today. (Everything below is for a DAWN installation .. untested in anything else.)

QUESTION: Where I can change the maximum allowed length (in characters) of the permalinks to postings?

There appear to be three possible solutions: :|

(...)

Hi! Does this also apply for trackbacks? As far as I can see, trackback links may contain max 100 characters. I've received trackbacks from a blog that uses very long URLs with more than 100 characters. Can I use the above hack?

Thanks!

I believe that the above applies only to permalink URLs and not trackback URLs, but you would have to experiment.

When I tested it this morning, I simply noted that the trackback URL doesn't employ the post title and is defaulted, instead, to:

http://yoursite.com/b2evoFolder/HTMLservicesFolder/trackback.php/postID_number

There seems to be little (default) opportunity for the trackback address to become lengthy and out-of-hand.

IF you wanted, instead, to have the post TITLE in the trackback URL, that's a different matter, but it seems, at first blush, that it would take two separate hacks to achieve it: (1) hack to change PostID to post_title and (2) hack to allow long trackback URLs (if they're capped somewhere).

Hope this helps.

Thanks for answering but my question wasn't related to my trackbacks but to trackbacks I receive from other blogs. The problem is that these links get broken when they have more than 100 characters. Is there something one can do?

The 100 character limit is the length of the database field, you might get away with just increasing it.

¥

¥åßßå wrote:

The 100 character limit is the length of the database field, you might get away with just increasing it.

¥

Sorry for asking once more a beginner-question: Where can I change it? I've opened phpMyAdmin. In the table evo_posts I can't find anything trackback related.

sorry I should have been a tad clearer, I'm assuming that it's comment_author_url field that you need to alter (the name might vary depending on your b2evo install)

¥
*edit* and the table you need is evo_comments

Thanks! You were right. Now, longer trackback-URLs are possible.

No problem ;)

¥