Can I create a search engine friendly URL from this custom ColdFusion CMS URL?

Question

I have inherited a custom ColdFusion CMS app. The URL's that it creates are horrendous. Not at all suitable for SEO or readability for that matter. An example of a URL in this CMS is:

http://www.mysite.com/Index2.cfm?a=000003,000010,000019,001335

Basically, each level of hierarchy is stored in the database based upon that long string of comma separated values. So in the case of the example I used, that particular page is 4 levels deep in the CMS hierarchy.

Basically what I would like to see is a format similar to this

http://www.mysite.com/level-1/level-2/level-3/level-4

Is this possible? Any help would be greatly appreciated. For what it's worth we are using ColdFusion 6 at present time, but will be upgrading to 8 in the near future.

Answer 1

First of all, are you willing to have the index.cfm in the URL? Like: http://www.mysite.com/index.cfm/level-1/level-2/level-3/level-4 ? If not, then you'll need to be doing a rewrite to remove the index.cfm, but still allow CF to process the page. Your .htaccess would look something like this:

RewriteEngine On

# If it's a real path, just serve it
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule . - [L]

# Redirect if no trailing slash
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ $1/ [R=301,L]

# Rewrite URL paths
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9/-]+)$ /index.cfm%{REQUEST_URI} [PT]

Next step, you'll need to "catch" the URLs and serve up the correct pages based on the SEO-friendly URLs. You can grab the incoming URL from the CGI.path_info variable. It's hard to know what your code should look like without knowing how it currently processes those URL variables, but essentially you'd have some kind of mapping function that grabbed the SEO-friendly names and substituted in the numbers to grab the content.

The third step is rewriting any URLs that are generated by your CMS to output the SEO-friendly URLs. Same mapping happens here, only in reverse.