Contentful Better Slugs

The Better Slugs is a simple UI extension for Contentful CMS that provides a more enhanced way to deal with slug fields. The existing slug functionality in Contentful is limited to one field (title) and therefore a bit limited for most of cases like:

• Work with Gatsby Preview
• Ability to automatically generate the slug with information from other fields (including referenced fields)
• Autogeneration of slug doesn't end when the entry is published

Overview

The extension has the following features:

• Generate a dynamic slug based on a pattern defined for each Content Model

Requirements

• Contentful CMS account with permissions to manage extensions

Instalation (UI - using this repo)

The UI Extension can be installed manually from the Contentful UI following the below steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Extensions
2. Click on "Add extension > Install from Github"
3. Use https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pauloamgomes/contentful-better-slugs/master/extension.json in the url
4. On the extension settings screen change Hosting to Self-hosted using the url https://pauloamgomes.github.io/contentful-better-slugs/

Usage

1. Add a new text field to your content model, it can be localized.
2. On the Appearance tab ensure that Better Slugs is selected
3. Provide your slug pattern, the pattern can use the following tokens:

• [locale] - Will replace the token with the node locale
• [field:your-field-name] - Will replace the token with the value of the field
• [field:your-reference-field-name:field-name] - Will replace the token with the value of field that belongs to the reference.

Example patterns:

[field:title]

Thats the default pattern, and probably for most of the cases would be enough.

[locale]/[field:category:title]/[field:title]

Assuming your locale is English, you have a reference field named category with title value Computers and your entry title is Laptop 15" the slug will be: en/computers/laptop-15

[field:date]/[field:title]

Assuming your locale is English, you have a date field named date with value Friday, April 10th 2020 and your entry title is London Event the slug will be: 2020-04-10/london-event

If you have non dynamic strings in the path and you want to localize them, that would be possible (until a max of 3) using the translations fields, for example having a pattern like /products/[field:name] and nl, fr and de locales, you can use products=nl:producten,fr:produits,de:produkte and products will be produkte on the slug field for de locale.

Other options:

Ability to translate strings from the pattern:

Option to not update the slug automatically if entry is published, hide the reset button and set the case mode (lowercase, maintain case, title case):

Optional Usage for Development

After cloning, install the dependencies

yarn install

To bundle the extension

yarn build

To host the extension for development on http://localhost:1234

yarn start

To install the extension:

contentful extension update --force

Limitations

Tested only with text and date fields, so not sure how it can behave with custom fields, it will depend on the value stored in the field.

The slug generation is based on the speakingurl library - https://github.com/pid/speakingurl

Todo

• Improve the handling of reference fields
• Improve the handling of date fields by providing a date format.

Copyright and license

Copyright 2020 pauloamgomes under the MIT license.