Quick CMS Question please

[planetmarrs23]

Hi Everyone

It's planetmarrs23 here, I hope you're all well.

Please forgive that I'm not only a newbie here, but I'm also not totally tech adept either (well, I probably know enough to make a change here and there though), but here goes with my question:

We currently have a number of sites that all run a ProcessWire CMS model 2.3.0 but unfortunately, my tech contact is away overseas for some time and we're unsure on how to change a subdomain page to each of our sites.

For example:   

Say our site was abcd.com.au and with a current sub page heading of ''All about ABCD'' - the URL listed in the CMS for the 'all about' page is displayed as abcd.com.au/all-about-abcd

but just wondering how we can change (via the CMS) the -'s to /'s in the subdomain page ie:

abcd.com.au/all/about/abcd instead of abcd.com.au/all-about-abcd (as each time I try to change it, it just reverts back to the hyphen in between rather than forward slash ?

It's probably an easy fix, but unfortunately I just can't seem to find where I can do it ?

Thanks very much everyone.

Regards

PM23

 

 

[diogo]

Welcome to the forum @planetmarrs23

It's actually not an easy fix, and it's also not advisable because the slashes in the urls represent a new document. Not only in ProcessWire, but in the web in general. In your case this would mean that "all" would represent a document, "about" would represent a document below it and abcd even another.

It's also not advisable depending on how long this document exists already. Changing it's name would break the links that might be directing to it from external pages.

Is there any special reason why you want to do this?

[planetmarrs23]

Thanks so much Diogo

Greatly appreciated  We might just leave it go now after reading your comments which sounds like the smart thing to do anyway. We were just trying to improve our SEO positioning in Google as we see all our competitors have the / forward slashes in their sub pages rather than - hyphens.

Thank you again

Regards

PM23

 

 

 

 

[psy]

Don't be put off by what your competitors are doing. They can be wrong.

Google gives lower ratings to pages that it sees as lower down the page tree... eg page abcd in the tree  abcd.com.au/all/about/abcd would rate lower (probably 40%) than page all-about-abcd in url abcd.com.au/all-about-abcd (probably 80% as it's one page off the root)

Google is also smart enough to recognise hyphens in URLs as spaces.

The only suggestion I would make would be to rename the URL to abcd-is-about - that way abcd is up front

Hope this helps

 

[psy]

Should also add... if you decide to change the abcd page URL, you should also consider redirecting any backlinks pointing to the old URL to the new one. Module 

 comes to mind but have no idea if it works with PW 2.3

[horst]

A better solution IMO: before changing pathes, install PagePathHistory. This one does it automagically for you, without the need of an (optionally error prone) extra step.

It is a core module that only needs to be installed:

You will find it in the admin under: modules -> core-tab (-> section Page)

 

PS: the great Jump-Links module from Mike is the tool when it comes to handle links from earlier sites / cmses and such stuff. But once you runs a PW site for the first time, you should enable PagePathHistory, IMO.
Only exception are sites that programatically create, modify and delete a high amount of pages / urls. But for all others, I enable this by default.

Edited December 14, 2017 by horst

[psy]

@horst thanks for that tip. Love that I learn something new about PW's inbuilt power everyday