Advanced URL Configurations

AEM CIF Core Components provides advanced configurations to customize the URLs for product and category pages. Many implementations will customize these URLs for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. The following video details how to configure the UrlProvider Service and features of Sling Mapping to customize the URLs for product and category pages.

Configuration

To configure the UrlProvider service according to the SEO requirements and needs a project must provide an OSGI config for the “CIF URL Provider configuration” configuration, and configure the service as described below.

NOTE

The Venia Reference store project, see below, includes sample configurations to demonstrate the usage of custom URLs for product and category pages.

Product Page URL template

This configures the URLs of the product pages with the following properties:

  • Product URL template: defines the format of URLs with a set of placeholders. The default value is {{page}}.{{url_key}}.html#{{variant_sku}}, which ends up generating URLs like for example /content/venia/us/en/products/product-page.chaz-kangeroo-hoodie.html#MH01-M-Orange where
    • {{page}} was replaced by /content/venia/us/en/products/product-page
    • {{url_key}} was replaced by Magento’s url_key property of the product, here chaz-kangeroo-hoodie
    • {{variant_sku}} was replaced by the currently selected variant, here MH01-M-Orange
  • Product identifier location: defines the location of the identifier that will be used to fetch the product data. The default value is SELECTOR, the other possible value is SUFFIX. With the previous example URL, this means the identifier chaz-kangeroo-hoodie will be used to fetch the product data.
  • Product identifier type: defines the type of the identifier to be used when fetching the product data. The default value is URL_KEY, the other possible value is SKU. With the previous example URL, this means that the product data will be fetched with a Magento GraphQL filter like filter:{url_key:{eq:"chaz-kangeroo-hoodie"}}.

Product List Page URL Template

This configures the URLs of the category or product list pages with the following properties:

  • Category URL template: defines the format of URLs with a set of placeholders. The default value is {{page}}.{{id}}.html, which ends up generating URLs like for example /content/venia/us/en/products/category-page.3.html where
    • {{page}} was replaced by /content/venia/us/en/products/category-page
    • {{id}} was replaced by Magento’s id property of the category, here 3
  • Category identifier location: defines the location of the identifier that will be used to fetch the product data. The default value is SELECTOR, the other possible value is SUFFIX. With the previous example URL, this means the identifier 3 will be used to fetch the product data.
  • Category identifier type: defines the type of the identifier to be used when fetching the product data. The default value and currently only supported value is ID. With the previous example URL, this means that the category data will be fetched with a Magento GraphQL filter like category(id:3).

It is possible to add custom properties for each template, as long as the corresponding data is being set by the components using the UrlProvider. Check for example the code of the ProductListItemImpl class to find out how this is implemented.

It is also possible to replace the UrlProvider service with a completely custom OSGi service. In this case, one must implement the UrlProvider interface and register it with a higher service ranking in order to replace the default implementation.

Combine with Sling Mappings

In addition to the UrlProvider, it is also possible to configure Sling Mappings in order to rewrite and process URLs. The AEM Archetype project also provides an example configuration to configure some Sling Mappings for port 4503 (publish) and 80 (dispatcher).

Combine with AEM Dispatcher

URL rewrites can also be achived by using AEM Dispatcher HTTP server with mod_rewrite module. The AEM Project Archetype provides a reference AEM Dispatcher config which already includes basic rewrite rules for the generated size.

Example

The Venia Reference store project includes sample configurations to demonstrate the usage of custom URLs for product and category pages. This allows each project to set up individual URL patterns for product and category pages according to their SEO needs. A combination of CIF UrlProvider and Sling Mappings as described above is used.

NOTE

This configuration must be adjusted with the external domain used by the project. The Sling Mappings are working based on the hostname and domain. Therefore this configuration is disabled by default and must be enabled before deployment. To do so rename the Sling Mapping hostname.adobeaemcloud.com folder in ui.content/src/main/content/jcr_root/etc/map.publish/https according to the used domain name and enable this config by adding resource.resolver.map.location="/etc/map.publish" to the JcrResourceResolver config of the project.

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