I’ve been thinking about this very thing lately (today) and I’ll be very interested in seeing what you end up with as I have similar views on the subject.

My currect site uses perhaps the worst possible scheme you can have, it’s dirified in a really wonky way that makes for some crazy ass long file names and little directory structure. Pretty much all the drawbacks of dirify and none of the benefits. I didn’t know any better when I started out and I plan to change this soon.

Thing is — I’m still not sure what to do about my old entries. I’m changing the file names, changing my main domain (7nights.com is old and pretty much meaningless at this point and since I’m messing with stuff…) and I’d hate to suddenly cut loose everyone who’s linked to my old stuff. I’ll probably just need to keep the old structure around for a bit. A true archive…

Anyway, must be nice to be at, what, 30 or so posts?

This kind of thing becomes a bit of a mess once you’ve broken 1000.

mikeindustries.com/articles/tech/40/

If I can go back to /articles/tech/ at any time, that’s cool. I could even go back to /articles/. I look at URLs like a navigation tool–if I can manipulate it to go where I want, I’m happy. I could care less if the title of an article is in the actual URL. And for the sake of beauty alone, I prefer URLs without an extension.

Plus, if you put the title in the URL, doesn’t that mean you can only use that title once in the given directory?

/archives/year/month/complete_title/

I forgo <MTEntryPermalink> for the reason you listed: I hate seeing index.php on the end of my URL’s. What if I change file types? Suddenly all links are broken? Do I have to alter my .htaccess file just because I’ve moved to a more suitable language? Bah, that’s all crap. Drop the file name and all is well.

I achieve this in MT by using this for permalinks (pardon the line breaks):

<a href="/archives/<MTEntryDate format='%Y'>/
    <MTEntryDate format='%m'>/
    <MTEntryDate format='%d'>/
    <MTEntryTitle dirify='1'>/" title="Permanent link">
        <MTEntryDate format='%l:%M %p'>
</a>

Yes it adds overhead to the processing time of MT, but the rebuild time is worth it to me for clean URLs.

In my Weblog Config on the Archives page, the monthly and category archives come with URLs suitable to my purposes. The individual archive one however needed a bit of work. For Archive File Template, I changed it to:

<MTEntryDate format='%Y'>/
<MTEntryDate format='%m'>/
<MTEntryDate format='%d'>/
<MTEntryTitle dirify='1'>/index.php

There are a few caveats of course. You still can’t edit post titles after publication and underscores still litter your URL. However, I think this is an improvement on MT 3’s default archiving scheme.

To answer the areas you requested feedback on, I think my above proposal elegantly takes care of Item 1. Item 2, I’m not familiar with any existing solutions, but it seems like it would be easy for an experienced MT plugin guru to help you out there. Item 3, yes, you can limit MT’s truncation. In my preceding examples, you would use this for the final directory instead:

<MTEntryTitle trim_to="YourLength" dirify='1'>

Additionally, there is this plugin which acts similarly to the trim_to attribute except it works with whole words. I’m not sure how that would stack up with an attribute you’re dirifying though. You might want to run some tests before you tear apart your templates.

Also, regarding your prepopulated search/404 pages, please see the non-existent directory “Monkeys” on NSLog() for a prime example of your solution. Erik there was kind enough to explain his solution with code.

Good things all around, hope this was helpful.

Anyway, I also wrote some PHP much like the PHP you suggest, to do auto redirects from my old, non-MT blog URLs to the new ones. Definitely a nice thing to do if you’re going to remove the old files. I can send the code along if you like (it’s about 10 lines of PHP).

I use Movable Type 2.x but I’m sure this works in 3.0 as well. I use ‘solution B’ – the files with no extension that is served as PHP.

For my ‘Individual Entry Archive’ under ‘weblog config’ I have this:

/

Dirify plus allows you to specify dashes, underscores, initial uppercase, lowercase, etc.

It works very well for me and was an easy install.

Also, if you’re not for urls that have ‘titles-that-are-eight-miles-long’ at the end of the URL, why not use the ‘MTEntryKeywords’ at the end instead of MTEntryTitle.

I’ve seen bloggers implement the keywords solution but they worry about legacy content that they didn’t specify keywords for – for this you can use Brad Choate’s MTIfEmpty plugin (http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/ifempty.php may be included in MT3) –

[MTIfEmpty var=”EntryKeywords”][/MTIfEmpty] (had to substitue some characters for the comment to display)

With MTIfEmpty, that code checks to see if you have specified keywords, and if you haven’t, it uses Entry Title. If you have, it uses the entry’s keyword.

Hope this helps. Love the site.

[$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y/%m/%d”$]/[$MTEntryTitle dirifyplus=”pld”$]

As for the Googlefied URLs, I prefer the longer method (/archive/%year%/%month%/%postname%/) because you can delete parts of the URL and “step backwards” through the site structure. For example, you could chop off the %postname% to see all posts for that year & month.

You can accomplish the headline-search shortcut with a custom 404 handler. Make a centralized 404 handler through with every 404 passes, and make it do smart things based on URLs: It could do a headline match, check a hard-coded redirect table, e-mail you the broken link if there’s a referrer, etc. This is what we do with our custom CMS at the newspaper site I work for.

See also Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman’s series on news-site URLs.

As for not knowing the title when typing, I don’t know if that’s a good enough excuse. I know at least Mozilla Firefox shows the title on the righthand side for visited URLs as you type — it should be a problem solved by the browser, not one that you depend on for URL creation.