IPS Tutorials: Tips and Tricks > Enabling friendly URLs Options

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IP.Board 3.x supports friendly URLs. The friendly url support can operate in a couple different ways, depending upon your server environment and configuration.

Enabling friendly urls
To enable friendly urls, you will need to download the conf_global.php file from your forum root directory, and add the following line

$INFO['use_friendly_urls'] = 1;

If you already have a line that has the key "use_friendly_urls" and the value is set to 0, change it to a 1 as in the code box above.

Configurable options for friendly urls
There are a couple of ACP-configurable settings that will affect friendly urls which you should be aware of. These settings are under the "Server Environment" setting group.

• Redirect to new friendly URL format?: The old showtopic=##, showuser=##, etc. style links will be redirected to the new friendly urls.
• Use "301" for friendly URL redirects?: IPB will send a 301 header when the user is redirected to the new friendly url
• URL Type: This setting only matters if you are not using .htaccess to rewrite the URLs. "Path Info" will make the friendly urls utilize "/index.php/" in them like so:
  
  
  http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php/topics/123-topic
  
  
  "Query string" will utilize "/index.php?/" in them like so
  
  
  http://yoursite.com/forums/index.php?/topics/123-topic
  
  
  This is a minor detail of course, but some servers are only able to read the query string method above, so if "path info" does not work for you, try "query string" instead. Of course, as stated previously, if you are using .htaccess url rewriting, this setting is irrelevant.
• Use .htaccess mod_rewrite: This will remove the "index.php/" from the URL entirely so that the URL looks like so
  
  
  http://yoursite.com/forums/topics/123-topic
  
  
  You must be using a server that has Apache installed with the mod_rewrite module, and you must upload a .htaccess file to your forum directory with the code provided in the setting description (this code is generated dynamically based on your configured url). If you are using another server environment that has native url-rewriting capabilities, you can enable this setting so long as you add a configuration file that tells your server to route all requests for files/folders that do not exist through index.php for processing. It is up to you to create the necessary configurations for other server environments such lighttpd or nginx, however.
• Incorrect Permalink Handling: This setting specifies how to handle requests for the wrong friendly url. For instance if the url should be "/1234-topictitle" but a user requests "/1234-othertopictitle", IPB can optionally do nothing (load the page anyways), add a meta tag to the page to tell robots not to index the page, or redirect the user to the correct version of the page. It should be noted that if you opt to redirect the user to the correct version of the page, and there are many such links on your site, this will increase the resource usage on the server. In this instance, IPB has to load all of the topic libraries and data before it can verify the friendly url is correct, and then when it redirects the user it must do the same again, in effect doubling the processing when incorrect urls are requested. If performance is a concern, you should avoid setting IPB to redirect the user to the correct permalink.

Configuring the friendly url formats
Applications that support friendly urls will have a furlTemplates.php file in their extensions/ folder. For instance, to change the format of the forum friendly urls you would need to edit /admin/applications/forums/extensions/furlTemplates.php. Each application can contain it's own furlTemplates.php, so you should repeat this process for each application you wish to change.

Afterwards, you will need to login to your ACP, visit the Manage Applications & Modules page under the System tab, and click the button "Rebuild FURL Cache". A file is cached to the /cache/ folder with the friendly url templates for all applications for performance reasons, so you must be sure to update this cache after changing the format of any of the templates. View the full article