Entry basename control

Those of you who have been blogging for at least a few years will remember a time all permalinks to individual weblog entries looked something like "http://www.example.com/002911.html" where 2911 was the entry ID of the entry in question. This scheme was not only unfriendly to users but also to search engines. Fast forward a few years and now we see the proliferation of search engine- and human-friendly URLs like the one for this entry thanks, in part, to Movable Type's basename field.

The entry basename, introduced in Movable Type 3.0D, consists of the first fifteen characters of an entry title with punctuation and spaces converted to URL-compatible characters. The basename is used by default as the base filename for the individual entry archive and will automatically add a number to the end of your filename to avoid collisions with similarly titled entries (title, title_1, title_2).

The problem with this, however, is that the automatically generated basename doesn't always include the most important parts of the title. For example, if you title an entry "My new job at Six Apart" you end up with "my_new_job_at_s.html". Not very helpful. And if you wanted to have a file name that was completely distinct from your title, it wasn't obvious how to do it.

With Movable Type 3.2, we really unleash the power of the basename field by allowing you to set it right in the entry interface. So now, you can title your entry "Play that not-so-funky music" and set your basename to "midi_ring_tones_on_your_cell_phone" to let link-hoverers and search engines know what they're going to find on that page. We all love control and this is one we know you'll come to rely on day in and day out.

[This is part nineteen in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]