FEATURE 2015.5 - Custom URLs are now auto-generated

Custom URLs are now auto-generated when creating a new product, category, attribute, content page, blog post, manufacturer, contact form, or profile.
The setting to turn on/off the custom url feature has also been removed, as custom urls are generated automatically now.

Custom URL Auto-Generation:

URLs are automatically generated for an entity by following the page url format setting found in Settings > Search Engine.

In the screenshot below, the page url format for the category is ##CATNAME##.

Therefore if a new category is created with the name "Equipment", the custom url generated would be "/Equipment" resulting in a url that resembles "www.mystore.com/Equipment".



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Custom URL History:

Custom URL History is a new feature of Custom URLs. When a custom url for an entity is changed, the original custom url is stored in that entity's custom url history.
Historic custom urls will automatically redirect to the current custom url of the entity.

For example let's say there is a product with the custom url "/t-shirt" that is later changed to "/blue-t-shirt".
Any requests or links to "www.mystore.com/t-shirt" will automatically redirect to "www.mystore.com/blue-t-shirt".

Custom URL History is automatically managed by the data-retention system. The setting to change the automatic clean-up time of custom urls can be found in Settings > Security > Data Retention.
It is important to note that the retention months of custom urls are based off of the last time the historic url was used, not when the url was inserted into the custom url history.



Historic custom urls can also be manually deleted on a per-entity basis. To access the historic url deletion screen simply navigate to the entity and click on the "More Actions" menu found in the top right corner.



The Custom Url History deletion page will delete all historic custom urls for the entity, that haven't been used since the "Last Used Date" field.



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Customization:

Certain store setups may conflict with the default page url format settings. For example a common store category structure may resemble this:
"Automotive > Tools"
"Home Care > Tools"


This setup contains two separate categories that share the same name, even though they are completely different. Since custom urls must be unique, a validation error will be thrown when trying to create these categories.

Being that both urls will be "www.mystore.com/Tools".

To remedy this situation there are a few options:
The custom url could be specified manually when creating the categories, which would override the auto-generated custom url.
The page url format for categories can be modified to ensure that all category custom urls will be unique.

If the page url format was modified to something like "##CATID##-##CATNAME##", then the urls for both categories would look something like this:
"www.mystore.com/1-Tools"
"www.mystore.com/2-Tools"

As long as the ##CATID## merge code is contained anywhere in the page url format, all custom urls generated for categories will be unique.