Slugify Sketch Titles, but not publicly exposed

[catarak]

Nature of issue?

• Existing feature enhancement

Feature enhancement details:

Right now, the link to sketches are only by the sketch id, which is not very human readable. It would be cool to have human friendly links. For now, the simplest version of this would be to generate a slug every time a sketch is saved from the title of the project, and then a user can navigate to the sketch using that slug by going to /<username>/sketches/<slug>.

[catarak]

i think this could be expanded a bit:

• slugified sketch names should have a length limit
• if a user changes the name of the sketch, what should happen? should the slug change? should it not change? should it be like wordpress in which the user has to manually re-generate the slug?
• how do you make sure slugs are unique per user?

[ankur54]

Hi. I would like to work on this issue if no one is currently working.

[catarak]

@ankur54 go ahead and work on it!

[ankur54]

After a little bit of searching over the internet, I came across a dependency "slugify" npm, which I intend to use. Also, could you please tell me in which file should I make changes?

[catarak]

slugify is already included, and you can already navigate to sketches via their slug. however, it's never linked to on the front end, so this issue is about linking it on the front end. there's not currently a design for this, and also i have some open questions which i listed above

[ankur54]

a) I think there should be a length limit. Around 40 letters would do, I think. If the length exceeds we can represent it with "...".
b) if a user changes the name of the sketch, I think, it would be better if slug updates automatically.

What do you think?

[catarak]

a) in #568 there's a discussion about the maximum length of a sketch name. i wonder if that would fix this issue. i think it depends on the maximum length of a url (which off the top of my head, i don't know what that is)
b) the problem with generating a new slug automatically is if a user has linked to that sketch. then, a link they possibly thought was permanent has changed.