Mechanism for url management?

Does livesite have a mechanism to manage the way your page-url's look? This could be used for:
- SEO
- hide the .page extension behind a fake .html extension
- make sure that existing bookmarks do not break when migrating to livesite

BTW, this mechanism should work two-ways:
- urls in the content should be 're-written' to the 'external format'
- incoming url-requests (in external format) should mapped to a .page-file (exactly like mod_rewrite does)

Hope to hear.

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vpatel

Does livesite have a mechanism to manage the way your page-url's look? This could be used for:
- SEO
- hide the .page extension behind a fake .html extension
- make sure that existing bookmarks do not break when migrating to livesite

BTW, this mechanism should work two-ways:
- urls in the content should be 're-written' to the 'external format'
- incoming url-requests (in external format) should mapped to a .page-file (exactly like mod_rewrite does)

Hope to hear.

Have you looked into URL Alias feature of LS?

RonaldV

URL alias?

The word 'alias' can not be found in the ls-manuals. :-)

Is there any resource/manual about this feature?

RonaldV

Ok,

url alias is not in the manuals (goes to show on the quality of those...) but can be found here http://your.teamsite.url/iw-cc/ccpro/help/en/ls_editing_node_details.html

It is a very useful feature but not what I was referring to. What I want is that all urls that livesite renders in the html are re-written like this (as an example):

http://my.livesite.com/sites/my-site/path/to/my.page

to

http://my.livesite.com/path/to/my.html

???

karel

apache url rewrite?

RonaldV

Karel,

apache url rewrite is only half the picture.

It will rewrite incoming request to a *.page request but the other half is that links in the rendered html should be re-written from *.page to *.html.

vpatel

Are you using page links?

RonaldV

What do you mean with "page links"?

vpatel

Are you familiar with the concept of page link vs "regular" URL link? In SP interface, you can create links by browsing directly to the .page files through the UI... Try out one of the OOTB components...

RonaldV

In that case is the answer: yes.

vpatel

Ok,

url alias is not in the manuals (goes to show on the quality of those...) but can be found here http://your.teamsite.url/iw-cc/ccpro/help/en/ls_editing_node_details.html

It is a very useful feature but not what I was referring to. What I want is that all urls that livesite renders in the html are re-written like this (as an example):

http://my.livesite.com/sites/my-site/path/to/my.page

to

http://my.livesite.com/path/to/my.html

???

Basically what you are looking for is a webserver level rewrites. This is exactly what a rewrites are supposed to do.

To address your issue/concern about, *.page links to *.html links:
First, to be clear it seems like you are generating .html files from .page files. In that case, if you use page links, they automatically get converted to .html links when you generate static HTML. All "non-page regular URL" links are left as-is and they'll have to be entered correctly by the user OR you can correct it programatically or heck you can handle it with a rewrite as well. You'll probably need 2 regexes (rewrites) to handle your stated scenario -- probably the cleanest way to do it.

HTH!

RonaldV

Hi Patel,

thank you for your answer but I am NOT looking for url-rewrites AND am NOT generating page -> html.

I want, as explained in my first post, search-engine-optimised-urls that among others hide the technology (e.g. livesite) behind, f.i., a .html extension. This is, I think, a very common requirement in a publishing-cms like Livesite. Most other cms have something simular.

To be able to do do I need to do two seperate things:
1. use mod_rewrite to rewrite a request for *.html to *.page
2. rewrite ALL urls in the output-html from .page to .html

Most important reason to require this is that current bookmarks, etc do not break when I migrate to the new site.

Is this clear enough?

vpatel

Oh ok -- when you said you wanted to map .page to .html I thought you were generating HTML pages. So to be clear, yet again, you have existing URLs (pointing to some .html files) that you want to replace it with LS pages, correct?

In that case, you still have 2 options:

1. Use LS Aliases -- make sure you are following the Alias rules stated in SP User Guide.
NOTE: This is done on a page-by-page basis.

2. Use Rewrites -- this is done on a much broader level. This will address your use case # 1 of taking care of existing bookmarks, etc.

For use case # 2, I am not sure what is the driving factor for having to convert .page links to .html? If you have .page URLs then they'll still work just fine, correct?

To be able to do do I need to do two seperate things:
1. use mod_rewrite to rewrite a request for *.html to *.page
2. rewrite ALL urls in the output-html from .page to .html

RonaldV

vpatel,

the driving factor was in my first post, which also shows that the 'work-arounds' you mention are not good enough:

"This could be used for:
- SEO
- hide the .page extension behind a fake .html extension
- make sure that existing bookmarks do not break when migrating to livesite"

miroperez

I believe url alias or it might be refered to as a vanity url wasn't until 6.7.1.

Sean_Hanck

I don't think that you'll find exactly what your looking for with the TeamSite/LiveSite product OOTB. I've done this in the past both with TS and other technologies, the approach that I found to work best was to leverage the remapping capabilities of your webserver (either IIS or Apache) to handle the friendly urls to LS urls.

This handles the first requirement, to handle the second one you need to have the reverse mapping in place. Depending on how users are authoring content you may/can do it in two places; first you could do it in the authoring environment using FormAPI to do the reverse mapping. Or second you could handle it in the presentation layer.

In the end the web user gets their "friendly urls" and the cms users is able to browse to .page (or dcrs) file.