Greek in page folder name

When I use Greek in entering the page folder name (for SEO reasons) I get a message

“Page attribute validation error”.
Folder names must be less than 31 characters long and not contain any non-alphanumeric characters.

How can I solve this?

I’d have thought that Greek characters count as non-alphanumeric characters, and that you really can’t unless you transcribe them to their equivalent ‘Latin’ characters…

Is there any work around? I would like to have Greek folder names in order to use keywords for SEO

Folder names are mostly irrelevant for SEO. Web servers running on Linux have a certain character set (e.g. ASCII) they are able to allow for folders and file names.

Jannis is correct in that folder names usually** have ver little to do with SEO – keywords, content, page titles and headings, and most especially links are your high priorities.

And I should really leave it at that. But I couldn’t help adding a bit of techy nerd to this answer, just in case you’re curious.

There is a workaround – however not one that is really part of RapidWeaver.

Here’s the catch… web hosting is probably has limits on what folder names you can create, and so will the FTP upload, and so will RapidWeaver, etc. Trying to add anything other than A-Z, 0-9 is going to cause a lot of problems.

But… URLs technically allow a very full range of characters. Some things are off limits, but technically speaking even emoji and other strange stuff can work.

So… you need some way to translate URLs with lots of interesting characters, into the boring folder-names your web host will allow.

This URL ~~> Folder Name translator is called a router.

You will likely have to do some work with the web server settings themselves on your host to set up alternate “routing” – some shared hosting might not allow it at all. And because of this, how you set up routing depends a bit on what sort of host you have, the web server software that the host is running – and all that makes routing difficult (or maybe even impossible???) to do from within RapidWeaver.

Does anyone know of a stack that configures a site-router?

If not, maybe that’s the next plugin I should write. :smiley:

  • If there is some friendly solution, then perhaps it could be something to look into – a way to give more localized URLs to your visitors.

  • Or, if you’re up for a challenge, and are technically minded (i.e. you like writing code), then look for a nice PHP router – PHP things are usually compatible with RapidWeaver and Stacks. The Laravel router is the top of the line – but also quite big and complex. I use a teeny tiny router for my own site to make the links nice, it’s called ToroPHP, but it’s also quite old and I’m not sure if anyone is working on it anymore, so maybe not the best choice either. Some googling will be needed.

  • If there’s no easy solution. And you’re not much for code (I can’t blame you). Then I think your best bet is just to boring A-Z.


** I have to say “usually” here, because no one knows the exact details of Googles ranking algorithm, we just make good guesses based on previous experience.

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Thank you very much or in Greek Efxaristo poli

I don’t really understand why folder names can’t be anything covered by utf8, but, then, RW8 still insists on converting non-ASCII characters into html entities, which is really irritating.

@peterdanckwerts - i don’t know the specific problem – but i think i can make an educated guess that’s probably not far from the mark.

RW must work with a wide variety of web hosts, ftp protocols, and web server software. so if one of those things has a limitation then either RW has to find a workaround for it or it becomes a limitation within RW as well. so RW probably uses something close to (but maybe not exactly) lowest common denominator of the features of all these OSes, protocols, and servers.

Windows FAT32 disks don’t have native support for utf-8. It’s a pretty strange format actually – it kind of has utf-8 grafted onto it. It has something called a “codepage” that is set at the time the disk is formatted and defines some of the details of how it maps multi-byte characters.

This (and other similar limitations to NTFS – HFS and APFS tend to have fewer naming limitations) probably limits RW to making a conservative assumption that utf-8 is going to be strange when uploaded to some servers – so it’s most understandable for non-tech users just to detour around those complications and stick to ASCII – or single-byte characters.

Parakaló :slight_smile:

Thanks, @isaiah. You’re probably right, but if our ancestors had eschewed the wheel to be compatible with those who were still transporting megaliths using logs, we’d probably still be in the stone age!

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