Expression Engine Import Problem With Same-Titled Posts
During the writing of the previous post, I found an Expression engine problem. Go me.
When I use a same title, like “Your Daily Sadie,” Expression Engine’s editor says it will name the post based on the title, meaning the URL would end in daily_sadie. In reality, it sees the name has been used and the URL ends in 1, 2, 3, etc. on subsequent same-named posts.
I went searching for “bubble” to find posts in which I previously opined on and linked people about the idea of a housing bubble. Sure enough, two posts came up, both titled “Housing Bubble.” They were imported from the pMachine version of the blog.
The URL on each ended in housing_bubble, so only the most recent of the two was accessible through the assigned URL. Doh! The first one, which references Virginia Postrel rather than Arnold Kling, required me to find it in the editor and change its assigned URL base that Expression Engine extrapolates as you type the title, but allows you to change.
Again, this works fine in new posts. It is an apparent oversight in the code that handle importation.
That sounds like an unfortunate side-effect of a previous fix.
In the 1.0 release of EE there was no collision avoidance code, causing the permalink page to bring up all articles that had the same URL name. In a follow-on fixpack they patched the code to generate unique names, even if you had used the same name as a previous post. In doing so it appears they also assumed that all posts would be unique and fixed the permalink page to show only the newest entry (which would be consistent with the last-in-first-out behavior typical to weblog software).
Given this, I’m starting to suspect that I may have some unreachable articles now. I know that I’ve used the same title more than once in the past.
Posted by Aubrey Turner on 01/18 at 06:57 PM
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