This is an advanced topic  for site bulders and the site administrator.
Topics

Background:

Sometimes it is desireable for a visitor to be told to go directly to page given into the system (e.g., Catalog, Products, Help, New-Users) rather than a sites actual address (e.g., /cgi-bin/complex2/showPage.plx?pid=15).  When a site is moved from one system to another it is also useful for the old addresses to be redirected to the new locations rather than having a Page Not Found error returned.  Finally, it is necessary for page addresses to be fixed (e.g., for use in QR codes) even if the visible page name gets changed.  

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Automatic Page Renaming:  i.e., having Catalog, Help replace /cgi-bin/....

  • This feature needs to be turned on for the site.  This will result in the Manage Content, Categories, and Products forms to have a line similar to "Mapped URL: / (Manual) Edit" or 'Mapped URL: /Home/System-Status (Automatic) Edit' appear.
    • The bolded text (e.g., '/' or '/Home/System-Status') is the address which the system will display.  If you want to give someone an address of a page on the site just put this after your site name (e.g., https://www.csz.com/ComplexHelp/Alias-Names-for-pages). 
    • The words Automatic or Manual indicate whether the address is system generated or whether it was manually set.   The page names can be changed by clicking on the Edit link.  This will display all current page names and how they are related.
  • How are the pages names automatically generated?
    • The system only selects the non-special pages (e.g., not hidden, not redirects to other pages and not in sections which begin with the magic '~'), non-hidden categories and non-hidden products.
    • For all names, any character which is not A-Z a-z or 0-9 is replaced by a '-'  then duplicate '-' are removed.  Duplicates are resolved by adding a number after the last letter
    • For content pages the name is the section name (with the leading '### - ' removed).  That's it if the page has a priority of 1-1 (magic top of section page).  For all the others it begins with the section name followed by a slash followed by the page title (e.g., www.csz.com/ComplexHelp/Alias-Names-for-pages, ComplexHelp section Alias Names for pages). 
    • For category and products a similar process is used.  Top level categories are treated as section names with subordinate categories and products appearing under them (e.g, Product-Showroom/Video-Slate/7-Video-Slate that is Category: Product Showroom sub-category: Video Slate, product: 7" Slate ). Note: Search engines want a given "page" to have only one address and categories and products can appear under more than one category only the first occurrence of a category or product will have an automatic name generated.  All other occurrences will have the old style names used.   Also, restricted categories will not be renames nor will categories or products under them renamed.  However, it these categories or products appear not under a restricted category, they will be renamed using that category as a parent.  Category names are guaranteed to be unique so adding numbers at the end should be rare.  Product names are not guaranteed unique.
    • Automatic - Renaming: whenever a product name,  category name or page title is changed the system regenerates the names for the entire site.  Please next section on how to get around this.
Fixed Page Names:
  • Old style addresses: Unless a category,  product or content page is removed the old 'cgi-bin/...' style address will always be the same.  Use the 'Copy Link Location' in your browser to get this address (its the View Page on the right column of the Mange Content page, its the [Link] next to
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Performance Impact

  • The system works by preparing the pages normally and then looking for each alias link equivalent (the second term in the Rewrite rule) in the generated page and replacing it with the alias
  • For about 15 aliases about 0.01 second is added to the time it takes to build the page.  Cached pages are displayed without any delay, but catalog pages are not cached since the quantity on hand may impact what is displayed and tags on certain pages (e.g., those related to calendar and headlines) may prevent the page from being cached.
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