I'm not aware of a solution for implementing custom persistent vanity URLs (my term, not sure if thats what they're really called) in DotNetNuke. Does anyone know of a solution? It can be configuring the core, using a third party module, or a suggestion of how to write it from scratch.
Here is what I'm thinking:
- I want to point people to: http://mywebsite.com/awesome
- I want the underlying URL to be http://mywebsite.com/genericpage.aspx?key=awesome&etc=etc
- I don't want the URL to redirect. I want the user to see http://mywebsite.com/awesome only.
Essentially I'd envision an administrator being able to create these vanity URLs and specify what the vanity URL is and what the underlying URL is.
The closest thing, out of the box, is to define your friendly urls in SiteUrls.config found in the DotNetNuke root.
This way:
Main restriction is that you will have an .aspx extension.
SiteUrl.config rules look like this:
Rewriter rule matches incoming url to a regular expression in the LookFor section, and sends it to an underlying url in the SendTo section. You need to be careful with the XML escape character '&' in the querystring parameters.
3rd party extensions like URL Master provide much more fine grained control, and you can have a global friendly url scheme based on page names, with or without .aspx extensions. Nevertheless, a simple "one url at a time" approach can be safer if you have custom modules with URL dependencies.