Scott McCulloch posted on June 02, 2005 16:13
DotNetNuke is a content management system that allows webmasters to
quickly build web sites (portals). Webmasters can create, modify and
delete any number of pages (previously known as tabs) within their
portal.
To provide this functionality, DotNetNuke will store the details about
the portal (page hierarchy) and the page content (known as modules)
inside a data store (default is a SQL Server database).
As with most data structures a unique key is used to retrieve content
out of the data store. Traditionally, this key has been known as
“TabID”, a parameter that appears in most DotNetNuke URLs for version’s
1.x and 2.x. As a page is requested, typically a “TabID” is provided to
identify the page within the application’s data store.
A traditional URL might have looked like:-
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/default.aspx?tabid=510
When the page is processed, a TabID is used to identify a number of items:-
• The content for the current page.
• The portal for the current page (TabID’s (pages) belong to a portal)
The above however, has a number of problems. Firstly, the above URL is
not easily remembered by a human, e.g. it is not human friendly.
Secondly, it is not search engine friendly, most search engines will
ignore or avoid pages with parameters.
This guide will investigate the requirements, the concepts and the implementation around Friendly URLs for DotNetNuke.