Jack McDade

Quickie ExpressionEngine Plugin: URI Prettify

Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by Jack in Development, ExpressionEngine

I really don’t have a good place to post this stuff right now as a blog is hardly ideal for storing ExpressionEngine addons, but until I get my real site up, this will have to do.

I whipped up this little plugin because I kept getting pinned into a corner when using Categories. For example, if an entry is part of more than 1 category, Blue and Red as subgroups of a Colors parent group for instance, and you’d like to list all entries in the Red subcategory… well good luck.

{categories limit="1"}{category_name}{/categories}

This will give you “Colors”. Not what we’re going for.

{categories limit="2" backspace='2'}{category_name} -{/categories}

Will give you “Colors – Red“, which will work, unless one of your entries is also in Blue. Since the categories are listed alphabetically, you end up with “Colors – Blue” even though your url is http://site.com/section/category/red”.

Well, why not just take the URI segment and case modify it to say “Red”? Easy enough, as long as your URI segments match the name. So I wrote a plugin to take any string, such as {segment_3}, and strip out the “_” or “-” delimiters and set words to title case. Parameters exist to uncapitalize words such as “and”, “for” and “the”. Give it a try, it just might come in handy in a pinch. Full documentation is in the plugin’s “Usage” area, which you can see in the Plugin Manager of your ExpressionEngine Control Panel, but here’s a quick example usage:

<title>{site_name} | {exp:uri_prettify uncap_keywords="yes" keywords="and|to|the|milk"}{segment_1}{if segment_2} | {segment_2}{/if} {/exp:uri_prettify}</title>

Download URI Prettify v1.0.

Tags: addons, code, ExpressionEngine, plugin