Hello Lee and Joe, I know you put out a tutorial on this and I just am trying to get some advice on how to best go about this. I have been given the job to overhaul a website for a client. This website has been using dotnetnuke since 2006 so it was started with the old DNN 4.5 version. Since than I have been upgrading them to the point that they are now on 5.4.2 and I would like to get them onto 5.6.1 for the sake of the security concerns that was found in DNN 5.0 - 5.6 but I figure because I am trying to be more standards conscience during this round of iteration of their design as well as more SEO friendly I need to know how to go about a couple things. I know I need to get them off the fckeditor and onto the telerik rad editor as the fckeditor doesn't seem to work properly in DNN 5.6 as I tried to upgrade them to this a month or two back and found the fckeditor had serious issues athetically speaking. So this html provider thing is definately a must in regards to overhaul and I think the SolPart Menu should be overhauled for a more standardized and light weight menu provider but if you guys read my thread concerning my concerns of the replacement for the solpartmenu which is DNN NAV you know on this point I am still searching for a menu provider that can meet my needs of not causing menu items to be pushed down to the next line when the width of the browser window covers some of these items. Anyway having already talked on this in great detail in the previous thread I posted I will save my conversation in this one to focus on the feasibility of reorganizing my site from showing the tab ids in the url to simply the use of friendly urls. I know Lee in your tutorial you showed how to rewire the web.config file in order for friendly url's to be generated but also warned that on older installations or ones that have been upgraded since the days of DNN 4 there could be backlashes in respect to pages that once were working to break since DNN was not using these friendly url's in the past (i.e. aboutus.aspx instead of tabid=50) So I guess the reason for my post tonight is because I need some feedback concerning the realisticness of such a transition considering I am dealing with multiple pages that have been created and are still being used since 2006 that could potentially blow up in my face if I were to simply wire the web.config file to use these friendly urls. I mean is it realistic Is it feasible, What steps should I take in regards to page remapping in order for this change over to be as smooth as possible Could this process be a big time consumer given everypage would need to potentially be changed within the installation to point to these friendly names. I noticed that it appears that your site here DNN Creative magazine is still showing tab ids in your url as I see even as I am typing you this message that I am on tabid 88 so obviously you guys have not attempted this transition yet. Has anyone who is on this forum taken the plunge to use friendly url's if you guys had been working with a DNN installation since before the time this was implemented or well known. I know any new installation by default starts you right out using these friendly URLS but I am concerned with how much SEO impact the use of the TAB Id's might have and if it would seem reasonable to go through all the work needed to start utlizing these friendly urls from an SEO perspective. I mean how much greater would the SEO be if I were to do this and really what other reasons would their be to converting a site to use these friendly URL's instead of the long tab string thing. Anyway thanks for any insight you guys might have on such stuff as this as it could prove to be quite useful to me in the next few weeks and month as I plan for this overhaul of my clients site that while is on 5.4.2 has been simply upgraded from one version to another since the days of 4.5. Maybe it would be better to start them on a fresh install of the framework and repiece their modules, pages, etc... back together though I can see this as quite a time consuming adventure so I don't know what is the better thing to do. A. tweak all pages so that friendly urls would work as expected B. Just start fresh with a brand new install of 5.6.1 and simply reinstall all their modules dealing with venders who require activation on your install and may break if it senses a different DNN install and let's not forget importing content, copying menu styles, etc. etc... C. Leave well enough alone as the impact of keeping things as they are in regards to these long URLS do not have a great enough impact on things to justify the time it would take to execute either choice A or B D. A solution other than the ones I listed. Any way thanks for any feedback you guys might be able to give to help me as I move forward with this major overhaul and as I try to figure out what kind of time might possibly be required to make this happen should I need to activate plan A or B. Take Care, Bo

just didn't want this thread to get lost in the different mix of various questions as understanding the feasibility of such an undertaken would be useful to me and I am sure others who have started with a DNN that was in the 4.x erra and have overtime used upgrade routines to get it into the 5.x erra, and have thought about using more SEO freindly url's but have been a little leary to do so do to the potential consequences that could occur throughout a seasoned website that might have a ripple effect in regards to those nasty 404 errors if things aren't wired right.

Thanks again everyone,

Bo

Hi Bo,

My site always had friendly URLs until I added the UK English pack and then it went to the unfriendly tabid's. Joseph suggested disabling the default US English pack and everything went back to friendly URLs again. Not aure if that helps you at all.

Joseph also mentioned that the next release of DNN would have more support for friendly URLs.

Oh , and I noticed that either URL type would display the page, so it would appear that a connection is retained.

Internally, DotNetNuke handles both.

hello there,

So would it be safe to wire the friendly url attribute into the web config file of my dnn installation that I have been upgrading since 4.5 to now where it is 5.4.2 and soon will be 5.6.1 or is there some precautions I should be aware of besides wimply wiring up the friendly url support.

In other words will I have to worry about pages breaking anywhere in my site? I guess definately I would if there were hard coded pages within html modules that referred to a specific tabid since the friendly url wouldn't use that method but I guess I am thinking mroe of the nav provider that dynamically creates links to areas of your website.

Would their be any concerns of menu items no longer working properly after the tweak of the web config file to friendly url.

Thanks for you guys imput in this matter

I think that this will be "relatively safe."  Be sure to keep a backup copy of web.config before you start.

And, assuming that you are using something like URL Master, be sure to look over their support forum for any issues.  I believe that you can define exceptions for pages that might have an issue.

Thank you very much Joe,

Yes I will definitely be doing some serious backups for more reasons than one as I am getting ready to overhaul the structure and look of a client's site but figured while I was at it I this would be a good time to implement the friendly url idea.

Thanks also to pingle 2009 for your input on this thread.

Hello Joe and Lee and others,

Just as an update to this thread I talked with powerdnn (my hosting company) in regards to the best way to approach a more solid SEO experience via the use of Friendly URLS.

I was told that Ifinity was known to become problematic when the need came to do an upgrade to the next DNN version. Apparently the work around if you have installed Ifinity onto your server was to disable the module via ifinity's instructions (which I haven't verified exists) before upgrading to the next DNN version what ever it might be and their should be no conflicts with the upgrade.

However having said this I did kinow that my latest clients that are using the later versions of DNN right from a fresh install (i.e. 5.4 and 5.6.1) did not have these tabids as part of their string in the url but rather instead of tacking on the tabid with default.aspx at its end it was tacking on whatever the name of the page was that was created with the aspx at the end.

For example when I did a fresh install of DNN using DNN 5.4.2. I noted that when I created a contact us page instead of the absolute url being something like http://www.yourdomain.com/tabid/554...fault.aspx it would be something to this effect http://www.yourdomain.com/contactus.aspx.

Of course the latter is much more friendly so I asked the tech support people at powerdnn if they had any knowledge as to what could be done to achieve this in DNN versions that have been incrimentally upgraded since 4.x till we reached the 5.x era.

As stated earlier the newer clients I have in which had a fresh install of DNN on version 5.x do not automatically use this tabid approach in the URL's where as the ones that started with a fresh install in 4.5 and incrementally crawled up to 5.4.2 and beyond still have this problem existing.

At any rate to sum up the story the technition looked into how this might be accomplished without using ifinity module which can be problematic when upgrading to another dnn version if you forget to first disable the module per the modules venders instruction.

So upon a little research they came up with the following link as seen below:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/1637/Turn-on-HumanFriendly-URLs-in-DNN-4-7-0.aspx

I created a txt file to attach to this reply but can't figure out how to attach a txt file to ths form when you are replying to a thread opposed to creating it. I know I saw the ability to attach a file when I created this as a new thread but now I can't find where I can attach a file as the replier of my thread.

Anyway Joe or Lee if you can help me to know how to do this within your active forum module when someone is replying that would be really great and at that time I will attach the txt file I created with the contents of the above website I posted.

But to sum it all up I guess I am replying to this thread to give viewers an update on what I have discovered via talking to powerdnn and looking at this thread in regards to the potential dangers of ifinity module but also to ask anyone who might have further knowledge about the approach talked about in this DNN blog.

Has anyone like me tried this approach with their DNN install in which they have been incrementing their upgrades since before DNN released their 4.7 version that implemented this friendly URL provider which I would assume could replace the ifinity module that did what DNN didn't do before 4.7 days.

Anyway just want to know your input on any issues that you either ran into or heard about or seems reasonable in regards to tweaking the web.config file to use the human friendly url provider.

In other what kind of dangers might one run into in doing this in regards to page breaking because the tabid no longer shows up in the url, etc...

I realize anytime someone is tinkering with their web.config file their is a danger in crashing the whole site but I am more concerned not about this possibility (as a good admin would make a backup of their web.config file before tinkering) as much as I am concerned about potential page not found 404 errors do to the fact that a new provider was used that has rewritten the url hence caused breakage to occur.

I realize the potential danger in this when dealing with html modules where someone has hard coded a link that uses this tabid approach but I guess I am speaking more about issues where solpartmenu, DNN Navigator or one of the newer DNN menu providers that was routing to the pages with tabid in the url break because the menu still tries to route to these pages even though the human friendly provider tells DNN to rewrite the page in a more friendly way.

So I guess the bottom line is with the use of the human friendly URL provider does it play nicely with the menu navigational providers especially the new one I am looking into using that is totally CSS friendly which is dynamic garden menu or something like that I know you guys have a tutorial about how to style this particular menu.

Anyway just need some input as I delve into an overhaul of a website that has been upgraded incrementally over and over again ever since like 4.5.x and now I feel it is high time we make it as SEO friendly as possible as well as web standards friendly as possible by getting rid of those nasty tabid in the url and swapping the new DNN navigational menu provider for the truly CSS friendly one called dynamic garden or something close to that, which as Joe stated in another thread I wrote does truly make use of the unordered list construct rather than giving you an attribute in which you can put unordered list in its value but not truly becoming totally non tabular as I discovered from experimentation. No matter what attributes I tried to tweak with the dnn navagational menu I could not seem to get it to lose the basic table structure in favor of the unordered list one.

So I will definately be overhauling the menu provider in favor of this free dynamic garden one but just need some feedback in regards to the wisdom of using this human friendly provider instead of infinity module to take control of the rewriting of my urls

I guess what I need to know from this community is the following:

1. is there any draw backs (besides potentially your whole site crashing because you didn't end a tag in your web config file properly or some other foolishness like that) in using the human friendly provider that now comes as part of the core providers for DNN since 4.7.x era opposed to using the modular approach via infinity besides the ones I am aware of which is the issue of having ifinity enabled when trying to make an upgrade.

I guess I'm thinking why should I use Ifinity if DNN has a good human friendly provider that comes free as part of its core as long as I do the grunt work of making sure it is wired up. I mean does ifnity have better SEO results than say the use of human friendly provider that comes inherantly with the newer DNN versions.

What would be a good reason to opt for one solution over another?

Thanks for your help in brainstorming with me the best path to take in turning my URL's into more human friendly therefore search engine friendly URL's as the answer you guys contribute will be valuable not just to me but to the DNN community that looks at this site.

Thanks,

Bo

I'm just jumping on here to clear up a misconception that is spreading fast. I'm contacting the hosting company involved to straighten them out.



There's several problems with this in relation to the Url Master module:
a) you don't need to disable the module to upgrade DNN. There's no requirement to do that at all.
b) you can disable the module if it makes you feel more secure (some people like to do this). It sounds drastic but in reality it just means clicking a button that says 'revert to standard provider'. When the upgrade is done, you click 'apply changes' and your site goes back to the way it was. This is a 5 second operation, and totally optional. I never disable the moduel to upgrade my DNN install.
c) the only requirement relating to Url Master and DNN upgrades is getting the right version before upgrading from pre-5.5 to post-5.5. This is due to the structural changes within DNN for the 5.5 version.

For the complete, canonical resource on this information, please visit this blog post:
http://www.ifinity.com.au/Blog/Entr...ter-Module

Finally, on the topic of changing from tabId urls to human friendly urls - you can switch on the human friendly switch from 4.7 onwards. There's no issue in doing that. But bear in mind this will create duplicate content in the eyes of search engines, because you now have two urls that point to the same page (ie /tabid/xx/pagename.aspx and pagename.aspx). Furthermore, and existing pagerank your existing pages will not transfer to your new pages. The result of just switching on humanfriendly urls is that a drop in rankings for the affected Urls is likely. This is both as a result of duplication of content and dilution of the value for incoming links now and into the future. The only way to work around this is to implement a 301 redirect for all the old Urls of your site, transitioning them to the new Urls. That's part of what the Url Master module does.

Thank You Bruce for this very informative reply:

So to sum it up it sounds like buying the latest infinity module (which I assumes would have fixed the issue of pior DNN installs) should do the trick along with rewiring the web config file to use the human friendly url provider.

I guess what I am trying to clarify is, should I opt to go with Ifinity's URL master would I also need to make this hard coded switch in the web.config file to use the human friendly URL provider or does URL Master do this for me.

Maybe in Lee's tutorial he covers this I am not sure as I have not looked at the Ifinity tutorial yet but it sounds like you have had some first hand experience in regards to this URL Master module so if you could just reiterate weather I need to rewire the web config file if using Ifinity or if Ifinity just automates this process for you that would be great.

After reading your reply on this thread I feel I have a lot more piece of mind in taking the plunge into these friendly url via Ifinity URL Master without the impending disaster that I was told was possible after DNN upgrades.

I thank you for helping me and others clear up this issue and thank you for contacting the hosting company to help them better understand the issue as well so they can be better informed how how to address this with their current as well as future customers as I know dnn creative magazine is one of their clients.

Thank You,

Bo