A new release of the iFinity Friendly Url Provider has been updated on the ifinity.com.au site.
This release is mainly a bug patching release, but as it is a while since I have posted an update to the DNN Forums, here are the main points:
- Produce Friendly Urls for all pages, including modules which use querystrings to filter content (such as Blog, Forums, etc)
- Automatically issue 301 redirects for all requests using the old (either default.aspx?Tabid=3, or /pageName/TabId/3/default.aspx) forms of DNN Url's
- Replace spaces and special characters with a character of your choice (myfirstpage becomes my_first_page or my-first-page). Also issue 301 redirect's to 'no space' versions of the Url that have been requested.
- Allows forcing of all requests to the lower case form of the url, if required. Also 301 redirects if different case versions of the Url are requested. (MyFirstPage because myfirstpage)
- Allows forcing of all requests to a particular subdomain, to eliminate the www.domain.com and domain.com versions of Url's floating around search engine listings.
- Allows removal of the .aspx extension from page names, giving simpler, cleaner and all-round better urls such as www.ifinity.com.au/Products/
Why 301 Redirects?
A 301 redirect is just a Http status code issued when you request a certain web resource. It means 'the thing you asked for has permanently moved over here'. If you issue a 301 redirect to a search engine bot, most of them will update their index with the new address. This means if you have an existing DNN site with 'old' Urls, then, by issuing 301 redirects, eventually your whole site will migrate to the new Urls without losing your page rankings.
This module is a free download, and the source code is available. It is a straight replacement for the core DNN Friendly Url Provider, and doesn't interfere with any other installed modules you might have. The install requires the dropping of a DLL into the /bin directory and modification of the web.config file. Instructions are provided with the download.
Get it at the free DotNetNuke Module Downloads page on ifinity.com.au.