Slug Smith
On content‑heavy sites, URLs are fragile.
As soon as you start nesting pages – landing pages, product pages, campaign pages – the structure gets complicated. Editors change titles, move pages under new parents, or duplicate content. Suddenly you’re not sure which URL is the “real” one, old links break, and you risk two different entries trying to claim the same path.
Slug Smith is a small Contentful app I built to take that problem away.
Instead of asking editors to hand‑craft slugs and remember the rules, Slug Smith sits quietly in the Contentful sidebar and does the work for them. Whenever you open an entry of the target content type, it looks at a few key fields – the title, the chosen parent, and any existing slug – and then:
It shapes a clean, URL‑safe slug from the content.
It walks up the parent chain to understand where this page lives in the tree.
It builds the full path from the root to this entry, like /products/bikes/mountain.
It writes that path back into the entry, along with a small bit of metadata describing the ancestry.
As the content evolves, the app keeps watching. If a path changes, the previous one isn’t lost. Slug Smith remembers old paths in a dedicated field so you can later turn them into redirects in your frontend or CDN. It also checks whether another entry is already using the same path and shows an error if there’s a conflict, so two pages can’t silently fight over the same URL.
The result is a URL system that feels solid instead of fragile. Editors can rename and reorganize without worrying about breaking everything; developers get a single, trustworthy fullPath field to plug into their routing; and the history of paths is there when you need to preserve SEO or legacy links.
Practically, this project is just a focused little app folder you can drop into a Next.js + Contentful setup and register as a Contentful app. Conceptually, it’s a way to make page URLs behave more like a first‑class part of the content model, instead of an afterthought bolted on at the end.
If you work with large Contentful sites, Slug Smith is my attempt to make your slugs boring again – in the best possible way.