Recently I've been requested by a number of people to explain the differences between the iFinity Friendly Url Provider, and the iFinity Url Master module. The obvious difference is one is free, and the other you have to purchase a licence. To help determine which one you need, I've done up a reference table of the features.
Differences between Friendly Url Providers
I get frequent request to explain the differences between the two DotNetNuke Friendly Url Providers available on this site. I’ve developed this features table to explain the differences feature-by-feature, and for comparison’s sake, I’ve included the standard DotNetNuke Friendly Url Provider that is installed by default with DNN.
Feature Table
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Feature
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DotNetNuke Friendly Url Provider |
iFinity Friendly Url Provider |
iFinity Url Master |
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Human Friendly Urls for page names
domain.com/mypage.aspx
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Human Friendly Urls for page names and query strings
domain.com/mypage/tabid/36/mykey/myvalue/default.aspx -> domain.com/mypage/mykey/myvalue.aspx
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Replace Spaces in Page names when generating Urls
domain.com/my_page.aspx
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Replace Page Url completely with any text, without changing the Page name
domain.com/my_replacement_name.aspx
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Can generate lower-case only Urls
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Child portals in ‘path’ style
domain.com/default.aspx?alias=MyChildPortal
->
domain.com/myChildPortal/
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| 301 Redirection Features |
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Automatically 301 redirect any Url for a page that isn’t the friendliest possible version
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Create custom 301/302 redirects from any Url in the domain to a selected page.
domain.com/MyOldPage.aspx -> domain.com/my_new_page.aspx
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Automatically 301 redirect the various home page Url's to a single version
/default.aspx /home.aspx and default.aspx?tabId=36 and home/tabid/36/default.aspx version to the site home page.
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301 Redirect non www Urls to www, or www urls to no-www.
domain.com -> www.domain.com
Or
www.domain.com -> domain.com
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301 Redirect to lower case Urls if mixed case Url requested
domain.com/Page.aspx -> domain.com/page.aspx
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301 redirect to chosen portal alias
domain.org -> domain.com
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| Url Formatting Features |
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Can run with any page extension, including .aspx, .html, or no page extension at all
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Moves language-specifier query string parameters to start of path.
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Can reorder parameters to give a consistent page name at the end of Urls that use query strings
domain.com/blog/2/entryid.aspx
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Can exclude human friendly Urls for specified pages, and revert to ‘base’ DNN friendly Urls for only part of the site
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Can filter which requests get processed by the Friendly Url Rewriter using a regex
The standard DNN Friendly Url provider blocks all .axd, .ashx requests, disabling some Http Handlers which rely on Url rewriting. |
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| Miscellaneous Features |
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Installs using the DNN module installer
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Not Applicable |
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Supports rewriting of custom rules, defined in siteurls.config
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Graphical User Interface for changing settings
Note: Specific Regex rules are editable in the Host Settings page, applies to other settings changed by editing the web.config file. |
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Can test out changes before applying to the website
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Can switch back to base Friendly Url Provider with a single button click.
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Not Applicable. |
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Can create custom rewriting rules to work with Modules such as AspDotNetStoreFront
AspDotNetStorefront uses it's own custom rewriting rules, which, if replacing the Friendly Url Provider, must be replicated in the new Provider. |
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Can do dynamic Http-Stream replacement of unfriendly Urls in generated pages.
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So, which one do you need?
Which provider you need comes down to (a) your requirements, (b) your technical skills and (c) your budget.
I'm going to exclude the standard DNN Friendly Url Provider because it doesn't do anything the iFinity Friendly Url Provider does, and if you're reading this, you're probably looking to replace it with a third party version. The iFinity Friendly Url Provider has many advantages over the standard DNN Friendly Url Provider, as shown in the previous table.
iFinity Url Master
I recommend the Url Master module if you suit any of these requirements
- You aren't proficient with editing ASP.NET configuration files, copying binary program files to your website and formatting up Xml attributes.
- You have a site built in a language other than English, and need to create pages with non-Ascii characters like Umlauts or other Diacratic characters
- You are replacing one or more existing pages and want to transfer pagerank and links from the existing page to the new page
- You would like to optimize the Urls for your DNN site pages, so that they include keywords and/or are more descriptive than what the 'page name' field in DNN allows.
- You are running a third party module such as AspDotNetStoreFront or Catalook, and need to get Friendly Urls working better on your site.
- You need to quickly adjust the Urls on your site without messing about with web.config files and FTP programs.
If I've missed any features, or haven't answered questions completely, please let me know via the comments!