Clean Trunks – Wordpress Plugin

*** Now has a new home here *** Download

Background

A common situation that frustrates me is the length that WordPress slugs amount to with auto-generation. Sure, its easy to update the slug permalink from the admin interface but in multi-access scenarios not everyone thinks about it or realises the benefit of optimizing the latter.

For good SEO, we need to keep the URL relatively short with targeted keywords present, this plugin will filter the proposed page name against a stopword list and hopefully retain good keywords all the whilst truncating the url to a reasonable size.

Plugin Description

Clean Trunks provides SEO Friendly URLs for post and page slugs automatically. This plugin does smart trunking on word boundaries to a configurable maximum number of characters. `Smart trunking` is achieved by use of an updateable keyword stoplist to help create those perfect SEO urls automatically.

Features

• Plugin configuration page where the maximum url length can be changed and the stopword list edited.
• Default stopword list supplied and loaded.

Installation

1. Extract the zip archive to your plugin folder, make sure it is in its own subfolder or deactivation and activation routines may fail. e.g: wp-content/plugins/clean-trunks.
   The zip contains two files: `clean-trunks.php` (the plugin) and `stopwords.txt` (default stopword list). The latter is used to load a default stop word list for the plugin to filter against once activated.
   Note: If you deactivate the plugin at any point, make sure you have a `stopwords.txt` file in the plugin subfolder.
2. Activate the plugin in the Wordpress administration area.

Instructions

Activate the `Clean Trunks` plugin after installation as above. Under Options you’ll find an administration interface where you can:

• Update the maximum url size which the truncation will work towards. Default: 35 characters.
• Edit the stop words filter list.

You can always revert to the original stop word list by de-activating and re-activating the plugin at any time.

Warning! If you save previously published posts with the plugin activated the url may change so make sure you account for this with rewrites. The option to bypass the plugin is in the Todo list which i hope to iron out soon.
Clean Trunks now ensures that previously existing permalinks do not change url when being edited after plugin installation.

Download

Download the Clean Trunks v1.0 plugin

Todo/Wishlist

- Internationalisation of the stop words list and potential hic-ups in filtering.
– Better stopword list user-experience for updates/deletions.
– Further bug testing.
– Override option within post/page editing interface to manually bypass this plugin.

Version History

v1.0

• Bug fix: Stopwords are converted to lowercase for comparison.
• Bug Fix: Explicitly set to ignore blank lines in stopwords.txt
  Thanks to Justin @ Walker Art for these suggestions.

v0.9

• Clean SEO slugs were not being applied when publishing but only after subsequent edit. Current behavior is to only clean trunk permalink when actually publishing.
• Pre-existing posts prior to installation retain their permalink when re-saving.

v0.8

• Initial Release of Clean Trunks, the SEO Friendly URL plugin for Wordpress