I'm creating a dynamic website with articles. Each article has a title, like "How does one eat a dog and live with it?", but also something I'm now calling "URL Friendly Title", such as "eating-a-dog".
I'm looking for a better word for "URL Friendly Title", because it's quite a mouthful. Wordpress calls them "Post Slug" but I dislike that too much. What would be a good name for these things?
I'm sorry to say that "slug" really does seem to be the standard term. Here is somewhat of an etymology on the term, it seems it comes from the (oldschool, print) news business.
You could have
Natural Name = "How does one eat a dog and live with it?" and URL Name = "eating-a-dog"
How about "short-name"? Near the entry field it would be a good idea to make it clear what this is by giving an example of how the short-name would appear in a url.
You could attempt to not give it a name and instead show how it would be used. So instead of having something like this:
Title : _______
URL Friendly Title : _______
you could have
Title : _______
URL : http://yourdomain.com/articles/______
I think the choice should be determined by the type of end users of your system. If it will be used by people who know the slang, go for slug, it is used in many CMSes.
If the software is designed for someone whose mission is to write text, and who are not familiar with tech-speak - then "slug" is a poor choice, because it rings no bells about the meaning of the feature. One will only figure it out by reading the manual, by asking someone else, or (most likely) by trial and error.
So my point is that you should go for a name that expresses the meaning of the feature, ex:
I would also consider changing "URL" to "link" or "address", because "URL" could mean nothing to a newbie.
Regardless of your choice, you should:
This enables people to understand what this field is for, without submitting the article and then observing what happened.
i think the best would be to display it as
URL: site.com/article/_
And if it is really important that the URL is appropriate/descriptive/SEO Friendly, you can place a red exclamation mark or something eye-catching next to the label URL, when the user hovers over it you can have a little pop up speech bubble (for example) that explains how to write the slug (and maybe even a warning if they do not use an appropriate SEO friendly URL).