>The main problem is that the URLS need to be something that can be told to an 'average' person, over the phone for example.  Parameters >on a URL don't usually qualify...

understand however dnn actually only has one url  - it only references default.aspx - what makes it work is the parameters after the default.aspx. However you can as stated in previous email use the url rewrite system to give a more friendly url or use the tiny url to give a shorter url. You don't have to use the parameters to pass the required data in the url you could use sessions etc but then you still have the problem that you are drilling down. and the dnn url will still  have the tabid and the control id attached to it this is a limitation of the dnn core framework.

If I want to find the professor that teaches sociology in the business study course at New York Univarsity then you are going to have some parameters set in the url no matter which system you use - the ending url will in no way be friendly - if however you just want the profile of a known professor then the url is going to be a lot shorter ie ?prof="Nerk"  thus if you don't know the name then you drill down thro the modules if you know the search criteria ie state,school,department,course or professor then the module does a straight search depending on the parameter type  but the url will still have the parameter attached  - if you set up seperate pages(tabs) for each parameter type then you can achieve a simple url such as default.aspx/professor/ and do the parameter search within that tab but at some stage you will still have parameters attached to the url to allow you to bookmark or reference that individual content to bookmark the end result you will have to include the search parameters that were used in the search

>I've been trying to come up with a way that I can meld\kludge the two schools together

as the core framework stands the two are seperate - the only way to meld them at present is via the iframe module - however dnn is a framework and it can be changed to fit a problem - dnn has always been limited by the resulting url's generated with dnn3 the friendly url system was introduced which is more designed for search engines but by plying around with the friendly url mapping file you could rewrite the url's into some other form but it still stands that if you are linking to the end result of a drill down you will still even on the friendly url need the search criteria in some form or other.