It's no secret that, for a long time, I've had this site running with no page extensions - instead of having all of the pages ending with .aspx, I converted it a long time ago to /. It's been pointed out to me several times by several people that the '/' should actually denote part of a path, instead of the actual resource. Deep down I agreed with this but it was harder to code : therefore confirming my long-held assertion that most programmers are actually lazy.
However, I'm happy to report that the laziness and inertia was overcome and I've refactored the Url Master code so that, when 'no page extension' is selected as an option, the paths will look like this : domain/path/path/page rather than domain/path/path/page/. Not only that, but I've also included a 301 redirect for the '/' suffixed paths back to the plain old path.
You can see the results just by looking at the url of this very blog entry.
How you can switch off page extensions
Like what you see? Well, you can have it as well. Just install the Url Master software, choose 'Page Extensions : none' and click on the 'Apply Changes' button. If you're on IIS7, that's all you need to do. If you're on IIS6, you'll need to enable 'wildcard' extensions before you click the 'Apply Changes' button in the Url Master module. There is instructions on the finer points of this in the Instructions Zip File : I won't repeat them here.
Terms and Privacy
In this release I decided to finally tidy up the terms/login/register and privacy inbuilt DNN Urls. For each of these, you'll get back a simple
domain/terms, domain/privacy, domain/login and domain/register url.
Which I think looks great. Check out the privacy and terms links on the lower right of this site to see what you think.
Want your site Urls like this?
Normally I wait until releasing the software before announcing new features or changes like this, but I am pretty happy with the result, so I decided to blog about it before I actually released the changes. They're in Beta testing right now, and should be available under general release in the next week or two. Of course I'll post about that update as well, because there is more than one new feature in this next release (which will be called Url Master 1.14) But don't hold off on getting the module now : the 1.14 release will be available to everyone who has an existing copy of Url Master. What do you think?
Do you like extension-less sites? Or do you prefer to show the world your asp.net origins and have the .aspx on the end? Perhaps you like to cloak your server and change your extensions to .html or even .php. Share via the comments below, I'm genuinely interested in what people prefer. Me? No extensions all the way!
FAQ on Switching off Page Extensions
Q: But I like my pages ending in / - I don't want to change!
A: That's OK, you can just enter '/' as your page extension, and it will work as normal.
Q: What about the Friendly Url Provider?
A: I will update the code for the Friendly Url Provider at a later date, in line with it's next release. You'll be able to get the same extension-less code when that release is performed.
Q: I've heard that switching on Wildcard extensions degrades site performance, is it risky?
A: It's true that switching on wildcard extensions will route all requests for all resources on your site through the asp.net runtime, and thus through many of the DNN modules. This has the potential to degrade performance, but to what degree I've never tested. My philosophy is : hardware is cheap - throw CPU at the problem. This site runs on a fairly small VPS and I'm happy with the performance. Test it out and make up your own mind. Incidentally, you can switch on wildcard extensions without changing your site Url scheme : so you can switch on the wildcard, monitor your performance and then decided whether or not to go extension-less.