In a large organization with complex marketing and publicity needs, shortcut URLs are a must-have for all advertising mediums. You might allow web content editors to create their own URL aliases, but what about the needs of thousands of other users in hundreds of departments? What about shortcuts for content in dozens of systems other than the main public CMS? Don’t clutter your main website’s redirects with everyone’s shortcut URLs. Give your users their own shortening service with YOURLs.
UT Chattanooga runs Drupal for their main public website, which has thousands of redirects for shortcuts, aliases, and legacy links. We have about 120 web content editors in various departments, but we don’t allow them to create arbitrary shortcut URLs, only canonical links based on the hierarchy of their section of the website. Although we will create shortcut URLs on the main domain, utc.edu, upon request, our general users wanted to create and manage their own shortcuts… and generate their own QR codes.
YOURLs (along with some plugins and a theme) fulfills these needs:
- Branded front and back ends
- Branded shortcut URLs and QR codes
- Single Sign On
- User levels and permissions
- Users manage their own data
