URL-cleaner

Removes all characters other than letters a-z, numbers and hyphens (-) from newly generated article URL.

Author:Jan Zikmund (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:3.0.1
WordPress version tested:3.0.5
Plugin version:1.0
Added to WordPress repository:18-10-2010
Last updated:18-10-2010
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
Rating, %:0
Rated by:0
Plugin URI:http://blog.janzikmund.cz/url-cleaner
Total downloads:1 441
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This simple WordPress plugin is used when generating article slug (= article name used in URL). It removes all characters other than letters a-z, numbers and hyphens (-). The plugin runs as the last one in the whole url-generating process, so first all standard replacements of diacritics and accents are performed, and then, if still some strange characters are present they are cut out.

So for example, without this plugin when you enter this as article title:

  • Hi — I´mˇ Zéké ‹ Nickname

this is how the suggested URL will look like:

  • hi-—-i´mˇ-zeke-‹-nickname

It is ugly and on some systems users won’t be able to open the page at all, because of 404 Error. So what this plugin does is, that it strips all weird non-text, non-numbers, not-hyphen charactes, making the title this:

  • hi-im-zeke-nickname