I recently was asked to transfer a multilingual site from working with languages based on cookies, to removing the cookie containing the language in the URL, for better SEO, while keeping the default language without the "prefix".
So instead of "mysite.com/page", I would have "mysite.com/{language}/page" for every language except for the default.
And so I updated the routing in the project to include the "{language}/URL" in an additional MapPageRoute for each URL.
The issue now is with relative paths for scripts and images etc.
When I am not in default language, the URL of these requests contains an additional "/en" or "/fr" or something, and of course there is no such folder.
Is there any workaround for this? I really don't want to have to replace close to thousand paths with absolute, or check for language before declaring them.
Related
I'm setting up access to a Drupal 7 site. The site sits alone on a box that answers to a number of domains and that number is likely to grow. What I'd like to do is to tell Drupal to load the site regardless of which actual domain brought us to the box (the rest of the URL will always be the same, of course). Currently most of those domains send me to the install page.
The problem is the lack of a directory (symlink) in the sites/ directory.
I can probably rewrite requests coming through alternate domains in Nginx, but I'm wondering whether there's an application level answer. As it stands right now, accessing the box/site by any domain other than the canonical domain sends me to the install page.
Is there anything I can do?
It looks to me that you didn't configure your Drupal site as the "default" one.
The file "sites/default/settings.php" is loaded if no better (more specific to the current request) settings file can be found in the sites/folder... This is in fact a "wildcard" config, so the best solution would be to move the site files to the default folder. See the multi-site documentation for more details.
If you can't do that, then you can use sites.php for the rewriting, but you will need to update it to add any new URL you want to match. There's a little shortcut though: you can add a bunch of rewrites such as
$sites['com'] = 'default';
$sites['net'] = 'default';
$sites['org'] = 'default';
...
which will act as catch-all rewrites for sites ending in .com, .net, .org and so on, saving you a lot of (but not all) the manual rewrites.
Altering the conf_path() function should really be your last solution, since it will make updating Drupal a slower process (and if you forget to re-apply the changes after an update, your setup won't work any more).
So I upgraded a very large DNN5 site to DNN7 for a client. Now all static links in the page content that point to page names with dashes are broken.
so the page name is Mid-Size Truck in the CMS
the static link from the old site that worked is www.somesite.com/MidSizeTruck.aspx
the upgraded dnn is now calling the link www.somesite.com/Mid-SizeTruck.aspx
so now when you click on the old static link it cant find the new page urls that have the dash included. There are thousands of these static links, is there a way to get DNN to remove the dashes like it use to?
I did however notice if the there is a space on both sides of the dash in the page name, dnn removes it from the url.
so ch1 - First Article
becomes
/ch1FirstArticle.aspx
Did you switch to the Advanced URL Provider (which is a web.config change)? Otherwise, I wouldn't expect the URLs to change.
There's a TabUrl table that has been introduced, which lets you specify URL aliases for pages (which will 301 redirect to the "real" URL). However, you may need to switch to the advanced URL provider to do that (which is theoretically unsafe since it might change URLs, but since it's mismatched, may not be any worse). To do that switch, find the <friendlyUrl /> element in the web.config, then change the urlFormat attribute to advanced for the DNNFriendlyUrl entry.
If DNNFriendlyUrl isn't the default friendly URL provider (e.g. you're using iFinity's 3rd party URL provider), that may be part of the issue, as well. At that point, you'd need to do some research with the developer of that URL provider.
I have a currently existing site with URL re-writing enabled using ISAPI Rewrite and IIRF files, the problem is it's causing a lot of problems, both for site development / maintenance and because of continuous errors on the server.
Because of this I'm looking to replace it with .Net 4.0's URL Routing.
I'm having two problems with this, first, the current routing rules are set up so that the page being routed to is simply the re-written URL with the file extension appended to the end.
So www.site.com/page/ would become www.site.com/page.aspx
The second problem is that certain re-written URL's actually point to physical files within sub-folders on the website using the same logic as above.
So www.site.com/folder/page/ would redirect to www.site.com/folder/page.aspx
I've read through this article and created custom IRouteHandler and IHttpHander implemented classes, but I'm not really sure where to go from here.
I've tried a few different things, mainly related to variables in the URL and trying to redirect to them, but I'm not sure that's the right way for me to go.
I'm not posting code because all I have at the moment is pretty much the example code from the link above.
I've implemented basic routing on another site where a single page uses a variable in the URL to grab the relevant content out of a database, and that seemed simple enough, but this is making my head spin, I'm sure it shouldn't be this complicated.
The situation is the following: I created a site with Plone, developed, used, but behind a test URL. Now it has to be published, but the test URL is not appropriate and I don't want to move the site. I think, if I use a redirect, it won't be appear in the URL-bar, only in the case of site start page. Am I wrong? (The test URL should not be used, because it will be a "semi-official" site.) What do you suggest to do?
As far as I can see Plone uses absolute URLs everywhere. I can add relative URLs, but if I create a new page, a new event, etc., then they have absolute URLs on other automatically generated inner pages. Is there any way to convert these URLs to relative paths? Is there any setting possibilty where only a checkbox changes this default setting?
Plone does not store your URLs in the database. It uses the inbound host header (and any virtual hosting configuration set up with rewrite rules in Apache or Nginx) to calculate the correct absolute URL when rendering the page.
In other words - as soon as you actually point the relevant domain name to the server with your Plone instance, it'll just work.
P.S.
You should put a bit more effort into asking your question. This is just a copy and paste of a half-finished email chain where you tried to get the answer from me in private. It's not very easy to understand what you're asking.
I think what you are looking for is url rewriting to handle virtual hosting. ie to get your site to appear as if it's the root url of a domain.
This is normally done via the webserver that normally sits in front of plone. For apache, here is a howto
http://plone.org/documentation/kb/plone-apache/virtualhost
for other servers
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-community-developer-documentation/hosting
You can also achieve this directly in zope (via ZMI) using something called the Virtual Host
Monster. see http://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/VirtualHosting.html
PS. I don't think your question is badly worded. Plone does serve pages with a "base" tag and what appears to be absolute urls. They aren't baked into the database but it's also not obvious that the solution to getting the url you want is the VHM url syntax and a proxying frontend webserver. There is a reason why it doesn't use relative urls... which I can't remember it was so long ago.
Sites like cnn.com or foxnews.com.
Where do they store all the articles? In html files? In database?
More logically to store everything in DB but how to generate a static link to something that is inside DB?
It's not that they have a a dynamic page load like: LoadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=123, every article has it's own address.
Please explain how this is done.
They use a special content management library called VoodooLib.dll.
Seriously, when you write something to a database, you normally generate some kind of unique identifier - 123, for example. It gets permanently associated with that record (article content). After that it is used to generate the same id as part of an Url at any time later.
As for the static link, it is a simple matter of Url Rewriting.
You generate static links to display on a page because they work much better for SEO. When a request for that static Url hits the server, it gets substituted for something "server friendly" and then gets to be processed.
They probably use some form of Content Management System (CMS). There are many different ones out there - most store the actual content in a database or as XML (some store XML in a database). They will the either publish that content as static HTML pages or, more commonly now, as dynamic pages that are cached. Many use what are known as "friendly URLs" that are virtual addresses that are mapped to the actual physical file path using URL-rewriting techniques.
Note you can't tell whether a page is dynamic or static simply from the extension. It is quite possible to have dynamic pages that end in the .html extension.
Just because the URL looks "static" doesn't mean it is; they could be using something like mod_rewrite or an IIS ISAPI to make the URLs more search engine friendly.
For the high-volume news sites that you mention, however, they may very well generate the pages statically in order to prevent overloading the database with repeated requests for the same article.
Look at the URl of this page, it doesn't have xxx.aspx?some-query-string
You are refering to using friendly URLs.
To do something like that, one common way is to use URL Rewrite and/or some custom HTTPModule
Here's a good reference: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
Just because a page has a normal URL does not mean that it isn't serving dynamic content. With the Apache mod_rewrite module, it is possible to manipulate URLs. So, for example, a page like http://www.domain.tld/permalink/12345/message-title-slug can be converted internally to http://www.domain.tld/permalink/index.php?id=12345&slug=message-title-slug.
I do not know exactly what cnn.com and foxnews.com use, but I would bet that they use a Content Management System (CMS) which serves all pages dynamically, with the content stored either in a database or on the filesystem, and with authoring/publishing all being performed through the particular CMS.
Just checking cnn.com, the article links have in them
Year
Location (US or WORLD/specificlocationid)
Month
Day
Article name.
All of this information together can be used to uniquely identify any article (even less of it is probably actually needed). The dynamic content loading page address could easily be hidden by some method of URL rewriting, and then the information in the requested URL is used to determine which article in the DB is to be served up.
I don't know why all the other answerers seem to assume that some form of URL rewriting is necessary to create friendly URLs. It's not true at all.
It's perfectly possible to write web serving code that splits a URL into parameters - eg year, month, title - and pass that directly to the code that gets the content from the database, without any need to rewrite the URL. Most modern web frameworks such as Django and Rails include this functionality out of the box.
This is done through mod-rewrite techniques.
Here's an article about the mod rewriting engine: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html
And here's their "guide": http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
I hope that helps. It should make for a good starting point. Goodluck.