Mongoengine: Broken links to documentation from Google search results

[shvechikov]

I get links like:
http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/apireference.html
instead of:
http://docs.mongoengine.org/apireference.html

[shvechikov]

Anybody here? :)
Even links on the main site are broken — http://mongoengine.org/

[basvandenbroek]

What is happening here? Is mongoengine no longer actively maintained?

[lafrech]

AFAIU, the links are correct. I mean the /en/latest is intended.

Ross modified the RTD theme precisely to add a canonical_url field in each page so that search engines always point to en_latest, even when indexing old version pages:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/tutorial.html"/>

This said, I don't know why those URLs are broken...

Is mongoengine no longer actively maintained?

The project is maintained (see commit log), although perhaps most issues are not being worked on and won't be closed unless someone with an interest in them sends a PR.

I also think a "Roadmap" discussion thread would be useful to have a clear idea where things are going.

[basvandenbroek]

@lafrech okay, I understand, thanks for your reply.

[bmbouter]

I came to report this issue, but I found this one instead. My description is that the homepage links are wrong.

If you go to http://mongoengine.org/ and click on tutorial, user guide, or API reference you will get 404's.

[lafrech]

As I said, I'm pretty sure the links used to work, did not changed and are correct.

It looks like something has changed, though, on Read The Docs, as, for instance

http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/apireference.html

should point to the content and does not anymore.

@MongoEngine/mongoengine team, any idea why those URLs are broken?

Did we change anything to our RTD settings?

[thedrow]

Not that I know off. Who is responsible for the website?
I don't have access to it.

[lafrech]

I guess @rozza initially created the RTD account a while ago and then he activated the RTD webhook in this repo's settings as explained here.

I went to the repo's settings and in the webhooks/RTD section I clicked "Test service". I think it triggers a rebuild (which shouldn't solve anything).

[thedrow]

@rozza Care to the a look? Can you grant all of us access to the website?

[rozza]

Having looked readthedocs changed domains to be canonical, so they always point to /en/latest/... but no longer have that in the URL.

Please email me your readthedocs user name and I'll add you as a maintainer. (In the meantime I'll fix the markup and remove any /en/latest/).

[rozza]

I should have said thanks @shvechikov for the ticket - it has helped get this tracked and sorted 👍

I've fixed the links by pushing a change to the: https://github.com/MongoEngine/mongoengine.github.com repo. Seems readthedocs also need to update their docs on the matter of canonical URLs. I'm guessing its a fairly recent change to how they do it, but annoying we were automatically opted-in to it.

@sebastiancodes MongoEngine is maintained by these wonderful fellows - see the commit history but they are always looking for help!

The website sadly has been left behind - my fault, I haven't solicited any help for finding new maintainers for it. I'm sure any changes / PR's would be welcome :) I'm happy to add any maintainers to that repo should they wish to take on the task of a redesign. As you can tell from mongoengine.org - web design is not my forte!

Keep up the good work all - and I'll try to make sure I check my notifications in github more regularly should you need me :)

[lafrech]

Thanks @rozza for investigating this.

Does this mean that the modification you did to the sphinx RTD theme to add canonical_url is not necessary anymore?

If this is the case, we could fall back to the standard RTD theme and externalize it. Less redundancy, better for maintenance and packaging.

See https://github.com/MongoEngine/mongoengine/issues/1260. I tried to had you canonical_url tweak merged into RTD theme upstream but this was rejected.

If you confirm, then I should

• close the PR on RTD theme (integration of canonical_url feature is now pointless)
• try to get the RTD theme out of MongoEngine and add it as a test dependency.

[rozza]

@lafrech iirc Canonical URL was used to stop http://mongoengine-odm.readthedocs.io/ being ranked above http://docs.mongoengine.org - so I'm not sure it can go. It should be updated to remove en/latest/ though.

I've asked for more information in your PR as I'm not sure what layout the directory builder uses.