If you were using OpenContent this would be taken care of for you. I use it for my company blog where /blog is the list page and /blog/{slug} is the detail page. Example: https://celestify.com/blo...site-from-ransomware

Specific to your case however, a UrlRewrite rule will do the job just fine. First make sure to install the UrlRewrite extension in IIS (direct link). Once you have that in place, you can use a rewrite rule in your web.config in the <system.webServer> block as follows:

Link to code snippet: https://gist.github.com/p...4026a68fe77b9366367f

I've just tested this with a Razor host module in a DNN 9.9.1 instance, seems to do the trick. Hope it works for you!

 

Thanks so much for your help! I'm trying to stick to the core offerings and not use 3rd party stuff unless necessary. I tried this solution but it didn't quite do the trick. I've been playing around with the idea though. I think that we may go with creating a custom URL extension provider.

Thanks again for your help!

I'm not sure that I like this approach. I think the ID maybe needs to be there as well.

I can see how it could work for the example of "Today's News", Each day there is a new Today's News page. I'm more concerned when you get TWO articles both with the title "Man Bites Dog".

I was once involved with a web site that listed films. Eventually we hit exactly this problem of ambiguous titles.

I would assume that OP has a backend mechanism that ensures the so-called "slug" e.g. "todays-headlines" is unique and automatically handles new entries with the same name by appending something to it, e.g "todays-headlines-2". Generally though website.com/news/{id}/{slug} is an easier approach and also achieved with a UrlRewrite rule in web.config.

Ps. UrlRewrite is an official (Microsoft maintained) IIS extension in case OP is worried about third party support.

Hi Richard, yes your concern is valid. Paras is correct in that we will have logic in place that will ensure unique slugs.

The reason for the avoidance of 3rd party modules whenever possible is that we had a vendor, whose modules we were heavily reliant on, change their pricing structure to something that was not feasible for us.

It's been much better to just use the core offerings when possible and so far that's been working out well for us. Razor offers a lot of flexibility.

I do wish the IIS option had worked as that would be simpler than creating our own extension provider but there seems to be something in DNN that is overriding the rewrite rule somehow. Which takes precedence, DNN's rewrites or IIS's?

Even with the IIS rule in place, this:
https://www.website.com/news/todays-headlines

Still goes to this:
https://www.website.com/news

It drops the slug if it isn't included in the url as a key value pair like this:
https://www.website.com/news/t/todays-headlines

But that's not what we want. We just need it to be https://www.website.com/news/todays-headlines

I've experienced this exact issue before where url params are ignored and the page gets redirected. Depending on your DNN version there are several ways to fix this, but they take some time to troubleshoot and test, there's no one-click fix unfortunately.

If you're running DNN 9.x, you can probably use the "Do Not Rewrite URL Regular Expression" option, under the "Expressions" tab to ignore the /news path from being rewritten by DNN. You'll find this under Persona Bar > Cog icon > SEO > URL Management.

Then you can use the Test URL tab to check whether it works. Worth pointing out that you may need to clear the cache in between, depending on how heavily your site is being cached.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Paras,

Gave that a try but it resulted in a 404. I noticed on one of our other websites, which is on a different host, that what I'm trying to do works there. So it is a setting that's preventing us from accomplishing this easily. I'll have to keep poking around and comparing the configuration for this portal to the other one and see what the difference is.