[TIP/TRICK] Making the URLS look pretty =)

[desibees]

hey SMF,

This is my first tutorial ever on this site. There are many of you that have helped me a lot so I decided to do a favor for some of you in return. In this tip/trick, I will be telling you how to make your URLS look pretty - my first priority when I installed the forum. From my personal experience and research, many of you are having problems with this, which also ends up to forum crashing.

1. Removing Index.php from Homepage only!

This will turn your URL from www.mysite.com/index.php to www.mysite.com. This is helpful because it removes it from the homepage only, therefore the rest of the forum will still work fine on all browsers.

Steps.
1. Go to your file manager, root folder and Edit: .htaccess
2. If the file is empty/or you created a new one, add the following code:

Code Select Expand

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/index.php$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ / [L,R=301]
If the following file already has "RewriteEngine On" written in, then add the last 3 lines after it.
3. Simply save the file and try it out.

2. Adding www. in front of the URL without breaking any pages
1. Log in to your site, go to Admin>Configuration>Server Settings>Database and Paths>Forum URL
2. If it says mysite.com, simply change it to www.mysite.com
^^ You are not done yet, doing this will break pages and cause many errors.
3. Go back to .htaccess, and add the following code under RewriteEngine On

Code Select Expand

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com\.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Make sure you change "mysite.com" to your forum URL - or else this will not work.
4. Save the file and try it out.

3. Making URL look prettier.
1. For this, you could install Pretty URLS, SimpleSEO or any alternative mod and this is what it will do:
    http://domain.com/board/topic/
    http://domain.com/profile/user/
    http://domain.com/unreadreplies/
^ Note, this will automaticly edit .htaccess for you, so you don't have to worry.

Good luck.

[Douglas]

Exercise due diligence (and research posting history before actually attempting to make any manual changes to your forums.

[macjive01]

Hello, could someone of higher authority and expertise confirm this trick before we newbies relegate our darling websites to error-hood.

[Illori]

some of them may work, but they really dont have much benefit to your forum.