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FriendlyID: A Slugging and Permalink Plugin for ActiveRecord

In Plugins

friendlyid.pngFriendlyID, a plugin by Normal Clarke, Adrian Mugnolo, and Emilio Tagua, describes itself as "the Swiss Army bulldozer of slugging and permalink plugins for ActiveRecord." In layman's terms, FriendlyID helps you get out of numerical ID hell and into an easily organized heaven of well formatted, textual slugs and IDs for your Rails apps.

For example, let's say you have a User model, you can add the following line:

has_friendly_id :login

And now you can write code like this (taken from the README):

@member = Member.find("joe")   # the old Member.find(1) still works, too.
@member.to_param               # returns "joe"
redirect_to @member            # The URL would be /members/joe

FriendlyID's Github page has a really solid README with further examples - it gets way more advanced than the simple example above!

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2 Comment Responses to “FriendlyID: A Slugging and Permalink Plugin for ActiveRecord”

  1. #1
    Nazar Says:

    I am a big fan of FriendlyID.

    It does, however, require some attention when returning a list of Slugged objects to avoid On query situations (i.e. include => :slugs ) ... this probably has been addressed in later versions (I am still on the Rails 2.1.3 compatible version).

    Excellent plugin gents!

  2. #2
    Ennuyer.net » Blog Archive » Rails Reading - Sept 21, 2009 Says:

    [...] FriendlyID: A Slugging and Permalink Plugin for ActiveRecord [...]

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