Update: I went with solution #2, removing the feature entirely. See below for a workaround if you want to still use this feature.

…As it is right now, anyway. Maybe. It all depends on how this post is received and the response to it.

The problems:

1. The feather viewing route is the single oddball route (excluding post/page viewing). Instead of a simpler /feather/quote¹, it’s /quotes. Same goes for /?action=quotes. It seems weird to have such a special spot reserved for such a minor feature.

2. It takes a special case to tell what we’re trying to do, because the action itself (the first thing after the / in the URL, e.g. /foo) is never the same.

3. In order for this feature to work, every Feather’s info.yaml file must be parsed on every page load, so that feathers can provide custom plural forms (you wouldn’t want /texts for the “Text” feather). This increases the page load time.

Viewing all of the posts of a feather seems like a very edge case when you consider that we’re lowering the quality of the entire application for it.

The solutions:

1. Change from /quotes to /feather/quote (/?action=feather&name=quote with dirty URLs).

   If you’re currently using the /quotes route exclusively and want to keep it, you could still do it rather easily with custom routes:

   # ...
   
   routes:
   
     quotes: feather;name=quote
   

2. Remove it entirely, and have it added via a custom route:

   # ...
   
   routes:
   
     quotes: search;query=feather:quote
   

Thoughts?