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.
How URLs are managed in Uniform#
A project map provides a hierarchical tree structure of nodes that define the URL architecture for your digital experience. Each node represents a unique URL with a path segment that, combined with its parent nodes, creates the complete URL path.
Project maps offer several key benefits:
- Visual URL management: Business users can visualize and manage the entire site structure without developer involvement
- Hierarchical organization: URLs inherit path segments from parent nodes, making it easy to restructure or reorganize
- Dynamic routing: Support for dynamic path segments, query strings, and locale-specific paths
- URL validation: Uniform ensures URL uniqueness and prevents conflicts
- Navigation and sitemaps: Easily derive navigation menus and generate sitemap.xml files
- Link management: Use link parameters to create and maintain internal links that automatically update when URLs change
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.
Deprecated: Slug-based routing
Using composition slugs for URL management is deprecated. Composition slugs should not be used to define URL paths when working with project maps. Instead, attach compositions to project map nodes to define their URLs. Slug-based routing is only maintained for backward compatibility with existing implementations.
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.