Any problems designing a site with this structure?

Hi kenny,

This question has been going round and round in my head for the past few days too.

I like structuring a site within folders, it's organized and the visitors know where they are in the URL. For example:

http://www.mysite.com/folder1/topic1.php

CMS Builder would display the above url as:

http://www.mysite.com/folder1.php?topic1-1

If a visitor thought by removing the ?topic1-1 they would move up the websites tree structure they'd be wrong as that takes us to the page that makes the topic1 bit work.

I may be completely wrong and trying to put a round peg into a square hole and completely missing the point! I just don't know how I should structure it using dynamic urls and so probably resorting to what I do know - dangerous I know! [blush]

Any ideas or ways you do it would be great to know. I am a CMS Builder newbie having only being used to categories (folders) and posts in Wordpress before this great bit of cms software - why oh why didn't I discover CMS Builder before - well that's another post entirely!

If I was to use dynamic it would be great if by removing the ?topic1-1 they would go to a list page rather than the make that makes the topic1 bit work.

Thanks Jono.

Hi Jono,

You have several options here:

1. Using Apache's "mod_rewrite", you can expose whatever URLs you want to the public and have them secretly changed to the format that your web scripts expect.

2. You could look into using "path info" to have your viewers mimic directories.

3. You could make your scripts redirect elsewhere if someone removes the query string. To expand on your above example, if a visitor removes "?topic1-1", the script could redirect the visitor to home.php.

(To do this, add the following code after the require_once for "viewer_functions.php")

if (!getNumberFromEndOfUrl()) { header("Location: http://example.com/list.php"); exit; }

These are all fairly advanced topics. The simplest solution is to provide sensible in-page navigation (e.g. a link for "<< back to list page") and not worry about exactly what your address bar shows. ;)

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. Creating a page for each record in a section seems like a lot of extra work!

Chris,

You are right, making pages for each record is gonna be time consuming.

I was basically after a nice url for seo reasons.

I have read lots of comments that the search engine bot doesn't see the mod-rewrite anyway as it isn't looking at it via a browser. And therefor won't see the benefit - is that true? If that's the case I'll probably stick with dynamic.

What do you mean by 'path info' is that the List Page Url in Viewer Urls area?

Thanks Jono.

Hi Jono,

I have read lots of comments that the search engine bot doesn't see the mod-rewrite anyway as it isn't looking at it via a browser. And therefor won't see the benefit - is that true?

Not at all. mod_rewrite works on the server and there's no way a search bot could avoid it. Search engine bots look like browsers to web servers. You have to go out of your way to make your website look different to search bots and browsers, and I've heard Google will penalize you heavily if you try that.

"Path info" is a way for web scripts to pretend to be a directory. It's a more complicated approach, so I'd stick with mod_rewrite.

P.S. I'm not even sure if you get penalized for having.urls?like=this anymore, since they're so prolific in legitimate content nowadays. Since Google doesn't actually publish how their algorithms work, SEO is more of a psuedoscience. SEO tips that may have been true in the 90s might still be floating around as superstitions.

Chris is right -- dynamic url's that include question marks and other characters used to be troublesome because search engines didn't know how to follow them.

They definitely know how to now and in fact, Google recommends against rewriting them too much. Take a look at this article from Google for more details:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

Thanks Donna and Chris for telling me about dynamic v static urls.

So dynamic it is then, especially as Google now say:

If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases.

Thanks Jono