Make Hosts and Cities use Slugs for Routing

[nickbarnwell]

E.g. for a city /cities/san-francisco/ and /cities/san-francisco/ankit for a host

[mehulkar]

What's this for right now? https://github.com/TeaWithStrangers/tws-on-rails/blob/master/app/models/city.rb#L24-L26

[nickbarnwell]

Returns a record suitable for use in a query string.

The path forward I see for this is:

• Alter Cities Table, change city_code column+index to slug
• Change all instances of for_code on the City object to query via slug instead.

Hosts are more complex; the reason I used ID was that names are terrible identifiers:

• They can include UTF8 chars
• It's hard to guarantee global uniqueness
• What's our scope for partitioning? Hosts are not kept to a single city, so it has to be globally unique (See last point :P)
• I don't want to have two fields for nickname where one is for users and one is for host if we can avoid it. The sensible thing is probably to create a sluggable module or similar where the slug is only editable by Admins and will eventually be set through our admin control panel. All lookups on sluggable objects can then be a Model.find_by(slug: $slug) || Model.find(id: $slig) proposition.

[ankitshah811]

I think host identifier fields should be as follows:

• Full Name
• Nickname
• Username

Hopefully Nickname = Username, but in the case of two people with same Nickname, ask them to write in their own Username (default behavior = autofill Username with what they entered in Nickname with error if there's a duplicate).

I think because hosts can change their cities (when traveling or when moving to a new home), their URLs should be /hosts/nick instead of /cities/seattle/nick.

And if we could, I'd love to make cities /san-francisco instead of /cities/san-francisco, and we could ensure that no cities have shortcodes that match another route on the website (i.e. error if someone creates city with shortcodes like:

• "hosting"
• "hosts"
• "about"
• "blog"
• "cities"
• etc.

How complex is this to accomplish?

P.S. I think shortcodes should actually be full city names with hyphens for spaces (i.e. san-francisco, seattle, and philly instead of sf, sea, phl. Some cities would have the same shortcode, like DC. I know that would make them...not-short shortcodes, but I think it's easier to follow and remember for users looking for specific pages without going through the homepage.

[mehulkar]

what's the purpose of a nickname?

[ankitshah811]

• Full name is for having clean / full identifiers of users.
• Nickname is to have a casual way to call them by name in emails, in the web interface, etc.
  • e.g. "Hey, I'm Ankit!" on my host page instead of "Hey, I'm Ankit Shah!"
• Username is to have a clean URL to their page (/hosts/ankit). This will, in almost every case, be == their nickname. The only exceptions should be if two hosts anywhere in the world from TWS have the same nickname, which isn't implausible at all.
  • If it's not ridic, I think it would be great to have a little JS that only revealed the 'Username' field only when it detects that the new host being created has the same nickname as someone else in the network. Not too critical to have this kinda icing on the cake, but if it's simple, would be dope.

[ankitshah811]

As we're going to be increasing the host count 400% in the next 2 weeks, I want to resurface this. @nickbarnwell I know you had objections to implementation here. Could we discuss those, sort out a clear approach and make this happen before the end of this week?

[nickbarnwell]

Let's chat about this tonight

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 4:50 PM, ankitshah811 notifications@github.com wrote:

As we're going to be increasing the host count 400% in the next 2 weeks, I want to resurface this. @nickbarnwell https://github.com/nickbarnwell I know you had objections to implementation here. Could we discuss those, sort out a clear approach and make this happen before the end of this week?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/TeaWithStrangers/tws-on-rails/issues/7#issuecomment-49243015 .

[mehulkar]

this is done.