Good name for “URL-friendly title”?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/806250

  •  03-07-2019
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Question

I'm creating a dynamic website with articles. Each article has a title, like "How does one eat a dog and live with it?", but also something I'm now calling "URL Friendly Title", such as "eating-a-dog".

I'm looking for a better word for "URL Friendly Title", because it's quite a mouthful. Wordpress calls them "Post Slug" but I dislike that too much. What would be a good name for these things?

Was it helpful?

Solution 3

I'm going for "Identifier"

OTHER TIPS

I'm sorry to say that "slug" really does seem to be the standard term. Here is somewhat of an etymology on the term, it seems it comes from the (oldschool, print) news business.

You could attempt to not give it a name and instead show how it would be used. So instead of having something like this:

Title              : _______
URL Friendly Title : _______

you could have

Title : _______
URL   : http://yourdomain.com/articles/______

You could have

Natural Name = "How does one eat a dog and live with it?" and URL Name = "eating-a-dog"

How about "short-name"? Near the entry field it would be a good idea to make it clear what this is by giving an example of how the short-name would appear in a url.

I think the choice should be determined by the type of end users of your system. If it will be used by people who know the slang, go for slug, it is used in many CMSes.

If the software is designed for someone whose mission is to write text, and who are not familiar with tech-speak - then "slug" is a poor choice, because it rings no bells about the meaning of the feature. One will only figure it out by reading the manual, by asking someone else, or (most likely) by trial and error.

So my point is that you should go for a name that expresses the meaning of the feature, ex:

  • friendly URL
  • memorizable URL
  • permanent link (something that is there forever, so it better be good)

I would also consider changing "URL" to "link" or "address", because "URL" could mean nothing to a newbie.

Regardless of your choice, you should:

  • fill it with a reasonably good default value (generated from the entered title)
  • show a preview

This enables people to understand what this field is for, without submitting the article and then observing what happened.

i think the best would be to display it as

URL: site.com/article/_

And if it is really important that the URL is appropriate/descriptive/SEO Friendly, you can place a red exclamation mark or something eye-catching next to the label URL, when the user hovers over it you can have a little pop up speech bubble (for example) that explains how to write the slug (and maybe even a warning if they do not use an appropriate SEO friendly URL).

How about "SEO Title"?

I call it "Friendly Name".

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