JURL Shortener for Joomla 1.5

• Description
• Demo
• Documentation & FAQ
• License 

Description:

JURL Shortener allows you to easily create short URLs on your own domain just like http://bit.ly and other url shortening services. JURL Shortener is an extension for the Joomla! CMS version 1.5 and is commercial open source under GNU GPL 2.0. This component is intended to easily allow site owners to create short URLs to both internal and external websites and do basic monitoring.

Providing short URLs from your website is great for marketing because even if you are providing links to an external site, people will still see your URL and will likely share your existing short URL rather than use the long one or create a new short URL. It is also useful for embedding tracking tags to monitor the popularity of different placements and influences, and which result in the greatest reuse.

JURL Shortener allows you to perform direct (HTTP 301) redirects or to use a header and place the original site in an iframe. This can help you provide social media functionality, advertising, or other features which you may provide on your site (only a basic header is included). Since JURL Shortener is written as an MVC compliant extension, you can easily customize the header or any of the output and use template layout overrides for optimal design control.

With JURL Shortener, you can create short links to both internal pages or any pages on the Internet. JURL Shortener was written to be lean, but provides great functionality. JURL maintains basic popularity statistics for each URL and records the hit count and last visit date for each entry in the database. If you want to prune or truncate your short URL database, there is a built in functionality to remove URLs that have not been visited for a user defined period of time and have fewer than a user defined number of hits. The built in statistics easily allow you to see how many URLs are in the database and which URLs are most popular. In addition, you can enable caching if your server becomes overloaded*. You can allow public access to the URL creation screen or lock down access based on IP addresses (recommended). In addition, JURL Shortener performs some basic URL sanitization and will add the default "http://" scheme if a user does not enter it to ensure all links are absolute URLs instead of unintended relative links. For more information, please consult the documentation below.

Web Design Hero welcomes your ideas and feedback, please click here to contact the author.

*Note: JURL Shortener is not intended for running your own major URL shortening service. It is highly advisable that such a service be built from scratch, and not on top of Joomla! or any other system to increase efficiency and security. JURL Shortener's security mechanisms do not substitute proper firewall, intrusion detection/prevention systems, or other security measures.

Demo: 

To see JURL in action please check out the following video demo at YouTube. This video provides an overview of how to setup, configure, and use JURL Shortener. The video has audio and is also fully captioned in English. If you would like to translate the captions into your native language, please contact the author.

A video demonstrating how to use layout overrides is coming soon.

Documentation: 

The documentation for this software is available in PDF format. Please click here to view.

System Requirements: PHP 5.2+, MySQL 5.0+, Joomla 1.5.XX. For more details, please see the documentation.

If you have additional questions, please contact the author.

License: 

You are not required to provide a link back to http://www.webdesignhero.com, but you may provide a link back if you would like to show your support for the software.


JURL Shortener is released as of 4 August 2010 under the GNU GPL 2.0 License.

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.