Search Engine Friendly URLs

[WireNine]

Is this going to happen with Kayako knowledge base or should we have to dump the script altogether? The developers should be including this because the rest of the competition knowledge base scripts already do offer this.

We will have absolutely no reason to stick with Kayako once we switch over to WHMCS, and ProvideSupport/LivePerson.

It's a nice all-in-one product, simply missing a bunch of features which have become a necessity.

- Better visitor information availability (Geo Location, etc)
- Search engine friendly URLs
- Feedback/Rating of Tickets and Chat sessions

I believe these features have been requested before, some of them have been requested quite often by multiple users.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi there,

You requested this feature here, and it has been accepted. We will be implementing it (as posted in that thread) in Version 4. Until then, I believe there is a mod available to achieve this. I certainly hope you do not "dump" SupportSuite. If you have any particular requirements or suggestions for the features you have mentioned, you are welcome to post them - we're aiming to implement most of what gets requested, and will certainly give consideration to everything that is posted.

- Better visitor information availability (Geo Location, etc)

We'll also be implementing this

- Feedback/Rating of Tickets and Chat sessions

and this in Version 4.

I believe these features have been requested before, some of them have been requested quite often by multiple users.

That is correct - you'll find such requests in the Feature Requests forum.

[John Haugeland]

Incidentally, you can get search engine friendly URLs today without altering supportsuite at all, using some mod_rewrite magic.

URL Rewriting Guide - Apache HTTP Server

But yeah, I've been talking to an SEO guy, looking into what our next steps in that direction are. No promises yet, because I'm still learning. We are aware that this is a serious problem for some people, and we're looking into the matter, but there's a whole huge pile of unknowns in SEO, and a lot of SEO experts disagree with one another; we're moving carefully.

[WireNine]

Just would like the dynamic urls to have title's in the url-

e.g. Where an url which once was "/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticl eid=183" becomes "/knowledgebase/What-is-a-top-level-domain"

It's not that hard of a task for Kayako team to achieve, you don't really need a SEO expert for this.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi WireNine,

Even though you would happy with a simple implementation of this, many of our customers would not - the notion and task is complicated, it isn't just about putting the title in a URL.

[John Haugeland]

Originally Posted by WireNine

It's not that hard of a task for Kayako team to achieve, you don't really need a SEO expert for this.

Well sure. But we do need an SEO guy to tell us what's important. We're not asking him how to do the work. We're asking him what needs to get done. None of the Kayako programmers are SEO people. (Jamie is, but SEO is one of those things where getting blended information from multiple sources is a win.)

I was just saying "hey, we agree, SEO is important, and it's being taken seriously."

Anyway, mod_rewrite cannot reasonably put ticket titles into URLs; that'd require writing an interceding shunt between the application and the rewrite rules, and that's way more complicated than just doing it in the codebase in the first place.

I am now aware of this desire. It'd be nice if there was a feature request for it, but other than that, moving forward, making me aware of it is most of what needs to happen, and I can get the rest done.

We're looking into it. I'm not allowed to say anything more concrete than that without getting an accept from upstream, and we don't have a concrete enough plan yet to get an accept.

But I agree with you, this would be a win, and I want to see it happen.

[craigbrass]

Anyway, mod_rewrite cannot reasonably put ticket titles into URLs; that'd require writing an interceding shunt between the application and the rewrite rules, and that's way more complicated than just doing it in the codebase in the first place.

Take a look at Its Elixir (powered by Viper Cart as of the Sunday just gone) - we have managed it rather well in our shopping cart application and look at the speed of it!

[John Haugeland]

I don't see what that has to do with mod_rewrite on kayako supportsuite. Also, we can't see mod_rewrite rules by looking at some random URL.

[craigbrass]

You said you can't put ticket titles into URLs. I am saying it can be done sanely and still maintaining speed.

[craigbrass]

We just rewrite everything to the index.php page by the way :-

<FilesMatch "(php|sql)\.log">
Satisfy all
Order Deny,Allow
Deny From All
</FilesMatch>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

### These three lines form the basis of the "seo" URL type, by redirecting all requests ###
### to index.php if the request doesn't match an existing file or directory. ###
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php


### Because .js and .css files can be considerably large, let's gzip them! ###
#Not calling _gzip.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !_gzip.php$

#Calling a .js or .css file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(css|js|js\.php)$

#Browser supports gzip?
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip|deflate

#Redirect all .css and .js requests through _gzip.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ _gzip.php?f=$1
</IfModule>

I'd be happy to give you some of our code for handling it if you want to PM me / email me.

[John Haugeland]

No thanks, Craig. What you're suggesting doesn't make sense with respect to the SupportSuite codebase. The title isn't available externally, and none of those rules have any mechanism for injecting the title into the URL.

What you would actually have to do would be to write a whole new script to poll the database to get the title to inject it into the link, then edit every single anchor the desk produced.

The mod_rewrite script you produced is not applicable to this problem.

[WireNine]

Ofcourse you can implant a feature to enable/disable this, so those who don't want or need it can disable it. Really come on now, this is available in every other script of every weekend from wordpress to joomla to a lot of other knowledgebase scripts and every kind of script you can possibly find today.

Take a look at http://www.kbpublisher.com/kbpublisher/demo/

[WireNine]

Anyway, mod_rewrite cannot reasonably put ticket titles into URLs; that'd require writing an interceding shunt between the application and the rewrite rules, and that's way more complicated than just doing it in the codebase in the first place.

Don't need ticket titles into urls. Just the knowledge base articles.

[craigbrass]

Don't need ticket titles into urls. Just the knowledge base articles.

Was also unsure where John got the idea we wanted it in ticket URLs. That would make no sense as it isn't public facing. KB articles are all we need.

[John Haugeland]

Originally Posted by WireNine

Ofcourse you can implant a feature to enable/disable this, so those who don't want or need it can disable it.

Sir, I've already told you that I agree with you and that we're working on this.