Comments on: Friendly URLs

By: mcsolas

mcsolas — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:17:15 +0000

If you are running ColdFusion on Apache then you have the popular mod_rewrite at your disposal for those on IIS it’s a bit more work as IIS doesn’t support rewriting out of the box.

I am now and very happy to have this tool at my disposal. This exact reason is what made me migrate away from IIS.

By: James Allen

James Allen — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:42:21 +0000

In the above, the code sample for setting the statuscode is:

I forgot to escape the html in the above post.. Doh.. ;)

By: James Allen

James Allen — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:40:57 +0000

Great article, although you are slightly mistaken concerning the 404 error handler method.

Rather than every non-existent URL being logged with a 404 error code, it is quite the opposite - every non-existent URL is logged with a successful 200 code (as the web server is directed to a real page on the server. E.G 404page.cfm). It is therefore important to ensure a 404 code is issued if the URL is NOT valid on the site to avoid a search engine indexing your ‘page not found’ text and storing an invalid page in it’s index.

On a site where I utlised this method I simply set the status code when a page was requested that wasn’t valid:

I do think there is value in the 404 method. The only problem I found was that you can’t POST back to the SEF URL unless you can also set the 503 handler to the 404 error handler template. On the site I used - on shared hosting - I was unable to configure this so had to find an alternative way to handle form submissions.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:46:58 +0000

I recommend IIS Mod-Rewrite pro which is superior to all other similar rewriter modules for IIS.

By: bincom

bincom — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:03:45 +0000

I use joomla very often and I learnt very painfully to always use Search engine friendly links. Apart from the lower ranks, most of the inner pages were not archived.

bincom

By: Richard Morton

Richard Morton — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:14:08 +0000

Simple URLs have to be better, especially in the slightly obscure case of cutting and pasting links, reducing the possibility of errors creeping in.

Richard Morton
www.qm-consulting.co.uk

By: BrookeA

BrookeA — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:12:54 +0000

Good info - thanks!

By: Michael Dinowitz

Michael Dinowitz — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:09:23 +0000

Ionic is great but it checks EVERY requested file, even images. Not what I want. I use it with a client using some tight regex, but that’s only because he’s still on ColdFusion 7.

I use this technique for House of Fusion at the moment
http://www.fusionauthority.com/techniques/4226-search-engine-safe-urls.htm
but will be moving over to the technique on Fusion Authority very soon. What is the FA technique? onMissingTemplate()

The above FA link does not exist as a physical file. When its requested, the onMissingTemplate() handler will look at the url and return content as if the file existed. Very smooth, very cool and very search engine friendly.

While the technique is described above, I have an article in the next FAQU that goes into deep detail on it.

As an aside, I mapped the .htm extension into CF using the standard technique of editing web.xml and the webservers mappings.