URL management
As headless architectures have moved beyond the concepts of pages and sitemaps, site managers still need a way to maintain URLs, and often this task falls to developers. This can cause friction for marketers or other non-technical teams when they restructure websites or launch campaign-based vanity URLs.
URLs represent the hierarchical structure for a specific location on your website. In Uniform, there are two primary ways to identify a URL:
Project map: Selecting a project map node contains to represent a URL for your site. If a base url is defined for your project map, it will be included in the final URL. Otherwise it's considered a relative path.
Free-form: A free-form path can be constructed. This could be in the form of a relative path starting after the domain, such as: /products/categories/technology or an absolute URL that contains the protocol and domain, such as https://www.samplesite.com/products/categories/.
Routing#
Routing is the process of resolving the appropriate content to deliver for a given URL or path.
In headless architectures the routing implementation is often a complex custom solution based on the application framework that's used for rendering of the pages.
Uniform streamlines the creation of valid URLs using project maps nodes and redirects by providing APIs and SDKs to implement routing in performant and flexible ways:
The route API enables fetching dynamic and static project map paths, as well as handling redirects, with a single endpoint. It's usable via framework-specific helpers, RouteClient, or the route API.
Redirects#
Once a URL has been published and indexed, site owners lose control of how it's used or distributed. So ensuring that those URLs don't break is a key task for anyone maintaining a digital experience.
Uniform Canvas offers no-code redirect management to support the creation of redirect rules for information architecture changes and vanity URLs and a flexible execution of the redirects for common frameworks and hosting environments and CDNs.