[pmwiki-users] Clean URLS cookbook question

[H. Fox]

On 2/5/06, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud schrieb:
> > Perhaps CleanUrls should itself be an overview page, with a
> > description of the approaches and links to CleanUrlsRewrite,
> > CleanUrlsAlias, and CleanUrlsScript, or something like that.
> > Or, we can leave CleanUrls as being focused on mod_rewrite
> > (since it's the most popular approach), but if we do that there
> > should be easy-to-find links to the other approaches (even if
> > they're just placeholder links until those documents are written).
>
> I'd vote for the first approach.
>
> The CleanUrls page should state:
> 1) What it's good for (i.e.getting rid of "pmwiki.php?n=" in the URL, so
> things are looking better to human visitors and search engines alike)

After working for a few hours on  that page, I think maybe it should
be called something like "ShorterUrls" because 'getting rid of
"pmwiki.php?n="' is not all people are trying to do.

It turns out there are three shorter-URL issues:

a) Getting rid of "pmwiki.php"
b) Turning ?n=Foo.Bar into /Foo/Bar
c) Calling PmWiki from a "higher" directory, perhaps even the server's
document root.

All three make the URL shorter but only (b) "cleans" the URLs.

Some servers may not give the wiki administrator control over
mod_rewrite or (especially) mod_alias.  Virtually all servers support
(b) and (c).

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/CleanUrls#index_php_note

> 2) For each documented technique:
>     2a) What's required (Apache and write access to httpd.conf for
>         CleanUrlsAlias, etc.)
>     2b) An overview of the advantages and disadvantages
>         (maybe - once it works, (dis)advantages don't count too much)
>
> IOW the overview page should give the visitor (1) enough information to
> decide whether this is interesting at all, (2) enough information to
> decide which of the various approaches is best.

For now I'll do it in a monolithic page, which I'll refactor to have
an introduction and three main sections for mod_rewrite+htaccess,
mod_alias+httpd.conf, and using an index file (index.php).

If more page are better, that can easily be done later.  Refining the
instructions themselves is more important than whether they should be
on lots of pages or just one or two...

Hagan