Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

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jobloggs
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Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2011 7:15 pm

Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by jobloggs »

We have category names such as "Audio & Video", "DVD, Blu-ray & TV"

When these are converted to URLs by interspire, the & and , and - are encoded (e.g. %26, %2C) so we have a very ugly looking urls

To mention one:

domain.com/categories/TV-DVD-%26-Blu%252dray/DVD%2C-Blu%252dRay-%26-Home-Cinema/

Aside from having a category slug where we can input the URL of each category if need be, I was wondering if there was some easier way to replace & and , characters with say "-" or some other method?

Any Help is greatly appreciated.
Brandeline
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Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2010 4:12 am

Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by Brandeline »

I'm not aware of any easy workarounds for this issue, though perhaps one of the guys who's sent more time in the code up to their elbows might.

I struggled with this a long time and finally gave up. I took all the special characters out of my product names and page names. It isn't much of a solution, but I couldn't find another way with the current code structure.
decoramould
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by decoramould »

Brandeline wrote:I'm not aware of any easy workarounds for this issue, though perhaps one of the guys who's sent more time in the code up to their elbows might.

I struggled with this a long time and finally gave up. I took all the special characters out of my product names and page names. It isn't much of a solution, but I couldn't find another way with the current code structure.
This has been my solution as well. Adding "and" instead of the ampersand looks essentially the same.
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MegaFemaTron2
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by MegaFemaTron2 »

This will give you what you want:

http://www.netvisionweb.com/software-so ... ping-cart/


Right now I'm sitting the fence on buying this mod because if you take a peek at the coders thread on the interspire forum, it sounds like it takes a long time for support and I'm not entirely happy with not knowing some key things about the software like, does it come with upgrades, how long is the support period, etc. He was asked this on the forum and never answered these questions. Also there are no screen shots, mention of a money-back guarantee or anything. Looks like the bare minimum is done in terms of presentation. For the money he's asking.... I don't know.

I may buy it if I can't work something out due to sheer desperation. I have 7k products and due to the nature of the projects I can't do a mass search and replace. I need to go through them all and make sure all of the spacing is correct, etc. Also many of my product names actually NEED the special characters as they identify the product even to the customer so I don't want to go through an take out special characters that the products need for identification. But if creating a URL without those characters was independent of my product names, then that's ideal. I don't want to have to change my product names to get a decent URL. It's times like this I just can't believe this shopping cart...

It's a shame because it sounds perfect!
ISC 6.1.1 Ultimate Edition
Brandeline
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by Brandeline »

Looks like an interesting mod, I agree, but a bit pricey too. On their terms & conditions it states no refunds, so I'd assume that's the case with this product too. Looks like they also have a policy of billing for any kind of support, and they say that the act of emailing them, phoning them etc, authorizes them to bill for it without any further authorizations.

Now I see that they offer $10 off if you 'like' them on FaceBook.. might be worth it to go see who has liked them, and see if you can ask their other customers how it went through FB.
MegaFemaTron2
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by MegaFemaTron2 »

Brandeline wrote:Looks like an interesting mod, I agree, but a bit pricey too. On their terms & conditions it states no refunds, so I'd assume that's the case with this product too. Looks like they also have a policy of billing for any kind of support, and they say that the act of emailing them, phoning them etc, authorizes them to bill for it without any further authorizations.

Now I see that they offer $10 off if you 'like' them on FaceBook.. might be worth it to go see who has liked them, and see if you can ask their other customers how it went through FB.
Ahhh wow, they took the "funky" road with their product. As a few pointed out on the Interpsire website, they need to be smarter about what they do with the mod as that is one thing Interspire claims to be working on (would most likely appear in BigCommerce) and that would be the end of their mod sales. So far I wasn't digging how long it took them to respond to problems. Actually another interesting thing is that they have their "likers" hidden... So you don't know who actually liked their page and can't contact them. Well, that's it for me. Moving on. :)
ISC 6.1.1 Ultimate Edition
MegaFemaTron2
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by MegaFemaTron2 »

I actually broke down and bought this mod. I have over 7k products and 80% have product names with special characters shouldn't be removed. So I felt I needed to take the business risk and buy this add-on. Besides the fact that I have a major advertising campaign about to be in full effect so I'd rather make the move to change all my URLs to better SEO ones now than after the fact. I'm also advertising in some print magazines soon and need to create landing pages. The best way IMHO is to create custom page templates for those landing pages in ISC so you can us the buy now button code, etc. But the problem I ran into was I created the ad and submitted it to the first magazine only to realize later the pages urls all have like sitename.com/pages/pagename.html and this wasn't the link structure in my magazine ad (and shouldn't have been since I can only afford small ads and all that won't fit. So with this mod, I can create the shorter page url.) I got the $10 off but the mod is still pricey.

UPDATE: They've removed the licence check. Cool mod now that it can't bring your site to its knees.
Last edited by MegaFemaTron2 on Fri Feb 24, 2012 2:33 am, edited 3 times in total.
ISC 6.1.1 Ultimate Edition
davebeck
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by davebeck »

The main reason I've never been interested in this mod is that it will be an absolute nightmare any time you want to upgrade your software. I learnt my lesson with making drastic changes to the core software back when I was using osCommerce.
MegaFemaTron2
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by MegaFemaTron2 »

This might be true for anyone not planning to stick with their current version your site is running. I don't intend to upgrade; just add what I need when it's needed. I upgraded from 6.1.1 and quickly went back to it because the "update" had too many problems. In the end, good URLs is worth the hassle. We also keep an up-to-date changelog as well. As it stands, it's too risky to upgrade ISC. You basically have to upgrade on a dev site and see what the bugs are but some may not reveal themselves until the site is in full use. It's really a trip how even the slightest problem can make you loose a customer. Also adding this mod was a learning process as well. Now I know more about how ISC works so I can also make better changes. I'm pass the point of thinking I'd upgrade ISC if they release another version. I don't even trust them anymore.
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Martin
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Re: Undesired Friendly URLs Encoded by Interspire Cart

Post by Martin »

Looking at what it does I have to admit it's not too shoddy...

Still chuckling at the "Like me you hate long demo videos" spiel that takes half the video to quit whittering on about before actually starting the demo...

Well aware I'm awful for long winded rubbish though, so irony self-evident :)
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