This week we further enhance our website's functionality with 2 new features. First, website content uses 'friendly' URL's from now on, that is the URL's of the articles and pages within the website can be read more easily. This way referring to a piece of content is much easier. The other change is that we offer a feature for our visitors to rate the articles from 1 star (poor) to 5 stars (excellent) ...

Friendly URL's

What does a friendly URL mean and what are the advantages of it? Let us begin with a short explanation. Our website engine (Joomla 1.5) stores website content in databases and upon request (that is the user clicks on a link) generates the article to be displayed dynamically. Because of this, URL's of the articles are not static html files, but parameters for the website engine instead. For example if you want to display the technology article on the Strike Eagle's engines, formerly you had to jump to the following link:

http://www.f-15e.info/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=101%3Aengines&catid=54%3Aengines&Itemid=154& lang=en

This URL is long and very hard to read. Difficult to copy it if you want to refer to said article on your website or in your post at a forum. And search engines find it difficult to index and rate.

Because of said disadvantages we decided to change this and apply settings to our website engine that is uses 'friendly' URL's in the future. In this context 'friendly' means that it does not contain parameters. For example the same article about F-15E engines now has the following URL:

http://www.f-15e.info/joomla/en/technology/engines/101-engines

Much nicer and easier to read, isn't it? This link tells you a lot about the hierarchy of our articles. If you take a closer look at it from left to right: the website name is obvious, joomla is the website engine's name, en tells you that it's an English language article (currently we have articles is Hungarian language as well), technology tells you the main section the article belongs to, engines tells you the category within the section the article belongs to and 101-engines is the ID and title of the article itself. It's more logical, shorter and easier to refer, plus search engines can index them more easily.

Article Rating/Voting

Article rating/voting is free for everyone, not just registered members. A visitor can rate an article (practically any articles) by clicking on one of the five stars below  the title of the articles. The rating is easy: 1 star = poor; 5 stars = excellent. Our website engine computes an average from the ratings and this average rating value is displayed then below the title of the articles. Articles with no valid ratings show no stars, but with the first visitor rating the stars will appear.

This way visitors can easily pre-judge the quality of an article with a first glance and thus can decide whether to read it for themselves or not. One visitor can rate one article only once.

Later on we plan to produce interesting statistics about ratings, plus it will be possible to produce a "top rated articles" list with articles having the highest ratings. For demo purposes we've already rated this article (with 5 stars of course :-).

Forum Discussion

You can discuss this article in the Strike Eagle Forum with the latest posts appearing here below as well. Clicking on the 'Discuss' button takes you to the SEF, while clicking on the 'Quick Post' text enables you to make a post here right away.

Article discussions are available for registered users only!