Multiple URL Formats per element type (Entries, Categories)

Question

I suspect this boils down to a feature request, but I'll start here in case there are any other ideas.

Basically, I want to be able to define multiple URL formats for a single section or category group.

Here is the scenario:

• Section gear with URL format gear/{slug}
• Category group productTypes with URL format gear/{slug}, {parent.uri}/{slug}
• Section reviews with URL format reviews/{slug}.

What I want to do but can't, is define a second URL format for productTypes, with the format reviews/{slug}, and {parent.uri}/{slug}.

Similarly, I want to define a 2nd format for gear, of reviews/{slug}.

So I'd end up with:

• gear/gear-entry/
• gear/category/
• reviews/category/
• reviews/gear-entry/
• reviews/review-entry/

So I really need Craft to know about those additional formats to avoid crossover URLs.

Routing and assigning the entry and category variables is not a problem, I'm really just concerned with the slug/uri validation.

Answer 1

So semantically, I don’t love the URL format you’re coming up with. I’d like to see something like /gear/{category}/{entry}

This gives you a few benefits

• it’s semantically readable…
• it gives you natural breadcrumbs for the hierarchy of content
• it’s likely going to be better from an SEO perspective

Relevant feature request: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/issues/1189

Answer 2

If you're only worried about URL collisions, it looks like there's only a few places where your routes overlap:

• gear/{slug} could match a gear entry or a category.
• reviews/{slug} could match a category, gear entry, or review entry.

One easy way around this is to just just make some of these routes more specific. For example:

• gear/{slug} (gear entry)
• gear/category/{slug} (product type category)
• reviews/category/{slug} (product type category)
• reviews/gear/{slug} (gear entry)
• reviews/{slug} (review entry)

Note: "category" above is the literal string, not the category's slug. But if "category" is too verbose, possibly just gear/cat/{slug} or gear/c/{slug}.

Or...

If you wanted to alter your URL formats minimally from your original scheme, another option would be to setup gear, productTypes, and reviews to all use the same route of reviews/{slug}. Craft will use a section's Entry URL Format when saving an entry to check for duplicate slugs.

• reviews/{slug} (product type category)
• reviews/{slug} (gear entry)
• reviews/{slug} (review entry)

Then just add a "category" segment for gear to make sure gear entries don't clash with productTypes categories:

• gear/{slug} (gear entry)
• gear/category/{slug} (product type category)