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DNN 10 and above - setting for friendlyUrl tag in webconfig

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Tom Melkonian

Advanced Member

Posts: 239

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10/30/2026 6:02 PM

Hi -
I'm testing an DNN upgrade from 10.1.1 to 10.2.1 (and beyond).

I noticed that after upgrading from 10.1.1 to 10.2.1, in the webconfig, the friendlyUrl tag urlFormat attribute was changed from "humanfriendly" to "advanced".

This makes it so that the pages urls dont show the '.aspx' file extension in the browser address bar, and pages with spaces in their Page Name use hyphens, etc.
Clicking around our sites, I don't see this change causing any 404's or other problems (if you browse to a lnk wth the .aspx extension, it redirects to the new format) .

I researched this a bit on the web and it sounds as though it's better to go with urlFormat="advanced" (instead of humanfriendly) going forward.

However, I wanted to understand this a bit better and verify what the best course of action is.

Does anyone know more about the pro's and con's of using urlFormat="advanced" or urlFormat="humanfriendly" when running DNN 10.2.1 and above?
And, when moving from "humanfriendly" to "advanced", what actions or precautions should I take to ensure a smooth transition?

Thanks

Tom

Jeremy Farrance

Growing Member

Posts: 84

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10/31/2026 12:20 AM

We have done a lot of sites over the years and found almost no side effects (unless we had actually done something previously to cause the problem - once, long ago, IIS rewrites). I generally would not worry about it. I cant think of any precautions necessary and definitely recommend "advanced" going forward.

Also, when you are at 10.01.01, the next recommend upgrade is to 10.02.05. If you are not familiar with the recommend DNN upgrade path, I strongly encourage you to follow it. The versions in between are more likely to expose you to problems that you would NOT encouter had you upgraded to the recommend milestone version (e.g. 10.02.05).

Additionally, in case you missed that too, once you are past 10.02, use the new upgrade proceedure. If you prefer a video, search YouTube for, "new dnn upgrade process".

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