Sitemap feature: document

Video Title: How to create clean URL in fastn

Owner: Ajit

Audience: Common

Goal: To make understand Why and How of this feature

Intro Clip

Welcome to the video!

Today, we will learn how To Create a Clean URL in fastn

Generally the URL of the page is corresponding to the location of that page in the package.

This makes the URL more complex.

Sitemap

To create the clean URL, we will learn about the document feature of Sitemap

Sitemap let's you structure your website by allowing you to organize your files in hierarchical manner ie. separate sections, subsections and TOC.

Document

In sitemap you can use documents feature to organize your urls better.

Why document?

it helps to decouple the package organization and corresponding URLs. So you can keep files as you wish in the package but URL still does not depend on the path of the file.
It empowers the user to give a custom URL to the page
And That also helps to give a clean URL
Not only this, you can include a file more than once in the sitemap with different URLs.

How?

Here we have two sections, Home and Season and the latter has 4 TOCs and each TOC has 2 sub TOCs.

Now to access these files my URL becomes the path of the file in this package.

So the URLs are long and complex. And there is another limitation that I want to give a custom URL to this section as current-season but this url is same as summer, so we cannot use this file with more than one url.

And if I want to use the file of summer season as my current season, It limits me to use the same path name as URL. So I cannot modify it.

Let me show how the URLs look in the browser.

When I click on season, it shows the summer season, which is the season at the time of recording this video. But the URL displayed is this, instead I wanted it as current-season.

Also the URL has folder name. and if you check other URLs as well, it is not the path we want to be displayed.

So document feature is the one stop solution to make the URL clean.

I will replace this with the custom URL.

# Season: /current-season/

Lang:

ftd

And just below it I will write, document followed by colon and give the path of the file.

document: /seasons/summer.ftd

Lang:

ftd

Make sure that when using document write the name of the file along with it's extension .ftd.

Now let's check in browser. There you go.

And just to confirm same file when opened with Summer Season toc, has the unchanged URL.

Now let's apply for other files too and check in the browser.

Now all URLs are clean and meaningful.

Closing Remarks

Thank you guys, keep watching these videos to learn more about fastn. Checkout the fastn website. Support us by giving a star on GitHub and connect with our fastn community on Discord.

Final Video