Using Hyphens In Post Names

There was a discussion regarding naming of posts in a CommunityServer forum (a surprisingly unknown feature of CS::Blogs, though even dotText .96 supported it). CS replaces spaces with underscores. However, Jonathan stated that Google prefers hyphens to underscores. So I tried to use hyphens in the post name, but I’ve stumbled over two issues:

1. You cannot enter hyphens in the post’s name edit box because the field validator won’t accept it. The regular expression is defined in the code as [a-zA-Z][1234567890a-zA-Z_\\s]{4,250}, i.e. only letters, digits, underscores, and white-spaces are allowed. To enable hyphens as well, you have to change line 155 in Blogs\WeblogPosts.cs to

   public static readonly string PostNamePattern = "^[a-zA-Z][1234567890a-zA-Z\\-_\\s]{4,250}$";
   

   and re-compile CommunityServer.Blogs.dll.

2. When you want to visit the post using the named url, you’ll get a 404 error. That’s because the regular expression in SiteUrls.config is defined as ``\w+, i.e. only letters, digits, and underscores. Again no underscores. Fortunately, there's no compilation required, instead change the regular expressions for weblogpostName and weblogarticleName` to:

   <url name="weblogpostName"
       location="weblogs" path="{0}/archive/{1}/{2}/{3}/{4}.aspx"
       pattern="([\w\.-]+)/archive/(\d{4})/(\d{1,2})/(\d{1,2})/([a-zA-Z][1234567890a-zA-Z\-_]*)\.aspx"
       vanity="post.aspx?App=$1&amp;y=$2&amp;m=$3&amp;d=$4&amp;PostName=$5" />
   <url name="weblogarticleName"
       location="weblogs" path="{0}/articles/{1}.aspx"
       pattern="([\w\.-]+)/articles/([a-zA-Z][1234567890a-zA-Z\-_]*)\.aspx"
       vanity="post.aspx?App=$1&amp;PostName=$2" />
   

   (Be careful if your SiteUrls.config differs from the default configuration, e.g. if you have used Ken Robertson’s SiteUrls Generator.)

If you’re using ScottW’s auto-naming module, you can skip step one including the re-compilation and just edit your SiteUrls.config.