Lee, I was counting the days until Paul’s next OWS video. However, when I saw that you had 6 videos on iFinity’s Master URL module I watched them first.
www.AgingSafely.com has relied on iFinity’s Friendly URL Provider for over a year. It fixes many of DNN’s SEO issues and funky URLs with ease.
As I understand it the major differences between iFinity’s Friendly URL Provider is that the provider doesn’t allow for specifying “per-page URL” other than using the page title AND it doesn’t have web interface to iFinity’s configuration parameters in web.config.
I have a “love hate” relationship with the iFinity Friendly URL Provider! I love it because it fixes so many SEO issues and that I have had so very few problems with it. I hate it because I am dependant on it, and CAN’T stop using it. You can’t stop using it for several reasons, so there are risks if it breaks, or DNN breaks it. The reasons you can’t stop are as follows:
- Google has indexed your pages using the new URL. If you disable iFinity all of these links will get redirected to your home page by DNN.
- While the links in your menus will be correct, any links that you have edited into pages by hand that are the new format will be wrong and DNN will silently redirect them to the home page.
- iFinty’s URL provider often reacts poorly with DNN’s upgrade process, and should be disabled prior to each upgrade, or at least at the sign of any problem.
- iFinity’s complex settings interacted with PageBlaster 3.x and I had to tweak both configurations to get them to work together. Now sadly I don’t remember which settings I had to modify.
Even if users have the iFinity’s Master Module, I recommend that the learn how to disable iFinity via web.config, so that they can do this without losing any settings.
Good video’s and iFinity is a great product. However, like PageBlaster it is “very sharp tool” and needs to be used with care if you want to retain all of your fingers.
/Dave Snow