Jan 02, 2006
Intechnic Corporation is pleased to announce the release of new versions of In-portal and its modules. With this release In-portal and all of its modules receive new significant feature – Friendly URLs (available when running Apache web server with mod_rewrite enabled)
Nowadays the most of the traffic to websites comes from the search engines. The popularity of your website heavily depends on the search engine rating and ability to “spider” your site correctly. In the early days of the Internet, the major search engines have shied away from the dynamic websites, afraid to be caught in endless loops generated by the host server and to cache temporary information that will not be valuable to the search engine visitors. This trend has slowly changed, as more and more websites have started to offer dynamic, yet stable and highly valuable content. However, a new trend has emerged, in that the search engines evaluate the URL of a resource to determine the relevancy of that resource to particular keywords. Here the dynamically built URLs with cryptic variables in the query string (everything after the “?” sign) loose out to the conventional, static URLs, in which file and directory names are meaningful words.
Since it’s conception, Intechnic has made sure that all URLs generated by In-portal are fully spiderable by the major search engines. Until today, however, there was no way to enhance the value of In-portal’s dynamic URLs by using meaningful text to improve the page rankings in the search results.
Intechnic has received a huge amount of requests for integrating In-portal with mod_rewrite – the Apache web server’ module allowing to rewrite the URLs on the server-side and call server software with different attributes for rendering different URLs. With this release In-portal adds support for this feature and makes it a very powerful tool in webmaster’ hands. In-portal like no other website management system makes the public front end of the website have absolutely constant, meaningful and search engine friendly URLs without query string. This includes the Links directory for In-link, online products catalog for In-commerce, categories and articles for In-newz, categories and posts for In-bulletin and all other front-end pages configured to be available publicly.
The In-portal new URL format consists of the language name, theme name, category path, template name and item name and enables you to control almost every aspect of the URL. In fully automatic mode the category and item filenames are generated from the corresponding items names, but if you switch to manual mode you could enter the category and items names by yourself. This is very useful when you want to include keywords inside the URLs.
In addition to search-engine friendly URLs the new feature makes the URLs persistent so each particular category, link, article or product on your website will always have the same URL (until you delete, edit or move it). This makes it easier for your site visitors to add bookmarks, send the URLs to their friends by e-mail or using instant messaging. It also allows you to put hard links to different sections of your In-portal powered website from the other websites you may have or when editing In-portal templates.
There are also many other advantages of using friendly URLs on your website. You may explore all the possibilities of the new In-portal URLs format by checking our live demo at http://www.in-portal.net/demo/ or by requesting your personal fully-functional demo by submitting the form at http://www.in-commerce.net/presentations/personal_demo.html. Current In-portal users may upgrade their installations to enable this new feature.
