How to Enable and Disable Human Friendly URLs in DotNetNuke
If you want to enable human-friendly URLs for your DotNetNuke website you can do so by following the instructions in this article.
Friendly URLs and Human friendly URLs are two different ways DotNetNuke generates URLs for things such as link modules and menu items.
Friendly URLs (Recommended)
Friendly URLs include a /TabID/##/ entry in their URL such as http://www.Site.com/tabid/32/Home.aspx.
The number after the TabID is used by DotNetNuke to identify the correct content to load from the database. The advantage of using Friendly URLs, is that the TabID for a page will never change. This gives you the flexibility to rename and move the page without breaking existing links. For example, you create a page on your website named "Home" and you create links from different places on the internet or other places on your website to it. The link for "Home" may be generated as: http://www.Site.com/tabid/32/Home.aspx. If you decide to move the Home page, or perhaps, rename it "Welcome", the new URL for the page will be: http://www.Site.com/tabid/32/Welcome.aspx Any existing links to: http://www.Site.com/tabid/32/Home.aspx will still resolve because the TabID ## is the same, however, any future links that are created to point to http://www.Site.com/tabid/32/Welcome.aspx.
Human Friendly URLs (Not Recommended)
Human Friendly URLs are only accessed by their page name path and do not include a /TabID/##/ entry in their URL. A Human Friendly URL may look like http://www.Site.com/Home.aspx. Because there is no TabID, DotNetNuke will look at the name specificed (in this case, "Home") to try to identify the correct content to load from the database. The advantage of using Human Friendly URLs, is that it generates a URL that is shorter and easier for a human to remember. However, the major disadvantage of Human Friendly URLs is that they tend to create broken links to your website and within your website which can significantly impact your SEO. For example, you create a page on your website named "Home" and you create links from different places on the Internet or other places on your website to it. The link for "Home" may be generated as http://www.Site.com/Home.aspx. If you decide to move the Home page, or perhaps, rename it to "Welcome", the new URL for the page will be: http://www.Site.com/Welcome.aspx. Any existing links to http://www.Site.com/Home.aspx will not work. You will then have to update all of the old links on your website to http://www.Site.com/Welcome.aspx and contact anyone on the Internet who has linked to your website and have them update their links, otherwise, they will receive a "404 Page Not Found" error when trying to view the page from the old URL.
Enable or Disable Human Friendly URLs
Open your web.config and locate the section below. If you are unsure of how to connect to your web.config please refer to our How to Access Your Web.Config.
<friendlyUrl defaultProvider="DNNFriendlyUrl">
<providers>
<clear />
<add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includePageName="true" regexMatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" urlFormat="humanfriendly" />
</providers>
</friendlyUrl>
If you want to enable Human-Friendly URLs, ensure that the urlFormat="humanfriendly" does exist as listed above.
If you want to disable Human-Friendly URLs, ensure that urlFormat="humanfriendly" is removed from that section of the web.config.
Article ID: 350, Created: April 7, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Modified: February 11, 2015 at 4:00 PM