Missing Features

One of the best features of WordPress is living proof of how URL usability is critical to web design. If you look at the URL for any posting on a WordPress site you will notice the URL starts with the date.

Take this example:
http://missingfeatures.com/2007/09/21/label-blindness/

Instantly, you know the story was posted on September 21st, 2007. You don’t even need to follow the link to know this off the bat. You can even start hacking off the URL to see listings for all posts on that day:

http://missingfeatures.com/2007/09/21/

or in that month:

http://missingfeatures.com/2007/09/

or year:

http://missingfeatures.com/2007/

Like all well-designed software, this feature is simple and beautiful.

So it came as a surprise to your correspondent that the FogCreek software team missed such a simple, fundamental feature in their new built-in wiki in Fogbugz: Unbelievably, their wiki does not support friendly URLs.

Instead of a URL that might read:

http://myfogbugzsite.com/CommonErrorMessages

you can only have

http://myfogbugzsite.com/?ixWikiPage=3

Ick!

Inelegant, unhelpful and an unusable design. This oversight was forgivable in 1997 (maybe), but certainly not in 2007.

(Wait! Rewrite rules don’t work in IIS! Actually, they do. Just build the ISAPI engine yourself and include it in the Windows installer for FogBugz. Easy.)

Trackback URI |