Hello Josh,

If you want to discard the /dashboard/ from the URL, you can create a hidden menu item that points to albums . This menu item doesn't need to be visible at all and it's just for the sole purpose of mapping a shorter url.

That's what I hoped for (been using hidden menu items for years). However that is not quite the reality as seen here: http://www.alpineascent.com/photos

As you can see, if you click any of the albums it will have the old path again (/dashboard/albums). I tested this with the stream as well.

Hello Josh,

Did you create a photos menu item or albums menu item?

I created a "All Albums" menu item. I do not see one for the word "photos". I checked through the whole list of ES menu item types.

Hm, it should really be using /albums/ if you have already created an albums menu. Is it possible for you to provide us with the back end and FTP access to your site to check on this issue?

Pardon the late reply, had to completely re-create my test site and carefully place over my community builder stuff into ES users. The username space issue also slowed me down. Now my test site is pretty stable and should be pretty clean as of right now.

I attached my ftp/admin login info to this post. The all albums menu item is in the menu named "Hidden Menu". I intentionally added a "z" to the alias so that it's clear that we are separate from the default. Keep in mind that I also have JoomGallery in the main menu which uses the alias of "photo". By the way, you are free to look through the JoomGallery admin settings which has quite a few goodies.

Just giving a friendly reminder about this issue.

Hello Josh,

Sorry, was a little occupied with some work. Hm, yeah you are right! I just realized that you can't create a menu to link to "all photos" so there's no real way to get the appropriate item id. Perhaps it should read the album's instead. Will try to get this into 1.2.6

Yeay! Thanks Mark. If you can help it, both the albums and photos should rely on the "all albums" in terms of url structure. So "dashboard/photos/item/39-hydrangeas/user/128-stacked" could be "photo/item/39-hydrangeas/user/128-stacked". Also "dashboard/albums/item/20-test-album/user/128-stacked" could be "photo/item/20-test-album/user/128-stacked". The simpler, the better!

Thanks, it will be fixed in 1.2.6. I've tested this locally and the URL would look something like /albums/photos/item/160-hydrangeas/user/879-bob

Yeay, glad to see it improved! Here is what it looks like for a single photo: http://www.test.alpineascent.com/photoz/photos/item/40-p1020545-jpg/user/josh
The word "photos" should be removed because the menu item is already specifying that it's photos. Again, "photoz" is spelt wrong so that we can easily see the difference between the menu item alias and what ES adds on to it. And if you guys are willing to go super fancy, we could remove the word "item" as well! This way we could have the url structure be "mysite.com/photo/40-p1020545-jpg/user/josh". The menu item after all is controlling it to be photos only. And in the scenario of no "all albums" menu item existing, it could use the "item" part as part of the fall back method if needed.

We are getting closer to a clean url. Short url's are great for sending to other people when sending someone a photo.

Hello Josh,

It's probably because you should name the menu item as "albums". Right now, both photos and albums would fall back to the "Albums" menu because there's no photos menu. So your URL structure should really look like /albums/photos/item/40-p1020545-jpg/user/josh . I guess this is pretty decent already but really, I don't think there's a way to remove the /item/ portion because if we do that, rewriting the URL back is almost impossible. Just imagine if your photo title is called "item"

I'll spin this idea in a different direction. You folks are into using Joomla's standards for URL's right? Why not do the same for albums/photos? JoomGallery already does this as seen on my site: http://www.alpineascent.com/photo/josh/one-of-the-pickets-813

I'll break up what the url represents: Domain > Menu Item > Album Name > title-id

This method is not only simple, but uses Joomla's practices.

The last post I made had a pretty good structure and uses a real Joomla example. However I figure we could make the structure really good. Here are two methods I propose:

Domain > Menu Item > Photo Title > Photo ID
alpineascent.com/photo/mount-torment-though-the-clouds/2

Domain > Menu Item > ID-Photo-Title
alpineascent.com/photo/2-mount-torment-though-the-clouds

These URL's would be extremely clean, use Joomla's standards, accessible if the photo name changed, and be good for Search Engine Optimization. Here's a live example of something similar on another site I post on. Obviously we want the menu item as part of the url considering that Joomla requires this. Anyways, if one of these two structures were used, it would be incredible! There would be no need to use bitly or another service to shorten the url. EasySocial would literally have better photo URL standards than Facebook which in my opinion would be pretty cool. Simple is better, these types of url's rank well in Google. I can prove this if you don't believe me. Please consider this for the future.

Hello Josh,

Thanks for the heads up on this, we'll consider this in the future.

Just a heads up that the menu item only semi affects the url. I have the albums menu item as seen here. But when you click any of the albums it offers a url in this structure: http://www.test.alpineascent.com/dashboard/albums/item/51-big-four-attempt/user/josh

It should display like this: http://www.test.alpineascent.com/galleries/item/51-big-four-attempt/user/josh
The good news is that both links work. So the route that it's choosing is the dashboard one instead of the simpler one.

The same is true with photos: http://www.test.alpineascent.com/dashboard/photos/item/144-heading-into-avy-terrain/user/josh

Josh,

Can you check the URL again?

Thanks, looking good now. Will this be included in the next release?

Yep, it will be included in the next release