# FriendlyId 4

This is an in-progress rethink of the FriendlyId plugin. It will probably be
released some time in August or September 2011, once I've had the chance to
actually use it in a real website for a while.

Please don't use this yet for anything real but feel free to try it and give
your feedback via the issues tracker.

## Back to basics

This isn't the "big rewrite," it's the "small rewrite."

Adding new features with each release is not sustainable. This release *removes*
features, but makes it possible to add them back as addons. We can also remove
some complexity by relying on the better default functionality provided by newer
versions of Active Support and Active Record.

Let's see how small we can make this!

Here's what's changed:

## Active Record 3+ only

For 2.3 support, you can use FriendlyId 3, which will continue to be maintained
until people don't want it any more.

## Remove Babosa

Babosa is FriendlyId 3's slugging library.

FriendlyId 4 doesn't use it by default any more because the most important
pieces of it were already accepted into Active Support 3. You can still just
override `#normalize_friendly_id` in your model if you want to use Babosa.

## In-table slugs

FriendlyId no longer creates a separate slugs table - it just stores the
generated slug value in the model table, which is simpler, faster and what most
people seem to want. Keeping slugs in a separate table is an optional add-on for
FriendlyId 4 (not implemented yet).

## No more finder status

FriendlyId 3 offered finder statuses to help you determine when an outdated
or non-friendly id was used to find the record, so that you could decide whether
to permanently redirect to the canonical URL. However, there's a simpler way to
do that, so this feature has been removed:

    if request.path != person_path(@person)
      return redirect_to @person, :status => :moved_permanently
    end

## No more multiple finds

    Person.find "joe-schmoe"               # Supported
    Person.find ["joe-schmoe", "john-doe"] # No longer supported

If you want find by more than one friendly id, build your own query:

    Person.where(:slug => ["joe-schmoe", "john-doe"])

This lets us do *far* less monkeypatching in Active Record.

## No more reserved words

Rather than use a custom reserved words validator, use the validations provided
by Active Record. FriendlyId still reserves "new" and "edit" by default to avoid
routing problems.

    validates_exclusion_of :name, :in => ["bad", "word"]

You can configure the default words reserved by FriendlyId in
`FriendlyId::Configuration::DEFAULTS[:reserved_words]`.