iFinity

I tend to receive a lot of email, enquires and forum posts about the field of Url Rewriting and Friendly Urls in DotNetNuke.  Generally the questions are related to improving the Urls on a site for the purposes of Search Engine Optimisation.

This post is intended to be a go-to resource for those questions, as the answer generally involves a bit of education on how the whole Url scheme in DNN fits together.  It's important to understand the basics before trying to improve upon them.  The aim is to educate on the issues and constraints at hand.

Defining Terms I'll use some terms throughout this post, so to clear up confusion, this is what I mean:

Url Rewriting : This is the process whereby the Url for a page is intercepted by the website platform, and modified internally, so that the rest of the processing sees the modified Url, rather than the original Url.  In DotNetNuke, this is typically the process of taking a pagename and converting it to a tabid value, so that the rest of the modules in...