RealURL

1.1. Introduction

1.1.1. What does it do?

The extension provides automatic transformation of URLs with GET parameter in the frontend (like "index.php?id=123&type=0&L=1") into a virtual path, a so called "Speaking URL" (like "dutch/contact/company-info/page.html") and back again. The objective is that URLs shall be as human readable as possible.

The extension is very flexible and can provide from simple translation of page IDs to encoding of almost any possible combination of GET parameters.

Examples

Typed URL	TYPO3 id and type
http://www.domain.com/	id=0, type=0
http://www.domain.com/products/product1/features/	id=123, type=0
http://www.domain.com/products/product1/features/leftframe.html	id=123, type=2

 

Background

TYPO3 works with page-IDs. This works great, however the URLs are very ugly ("...index.php?id=123&type=0&L=1...." etc.). There are workarounds (simulateStaticDocuments), but that's just a fake: the ID must still be supplied in the URL, which is not desirable. Furthermore, only the page-title is shown, not the complete 'path' (or 'rootline') to the page.

Normally, you type in the path and filename of a document, but TYPO3 works exclusively with page-IDs. The RealURL-extension provides a way to translate between page-IDs and (virtual) URLs that are easy to read and remember.

The extension requires the Apache module "mod_rewrite" to rewrite the virtual URLs of the site to the TYPO3 frontend engine.

Generally it will work out-of-the-box but you will have to address the issue that all media referenced in the HTML page has to have either absolute URLs or the <base> tag set. Both methods has advantages and drawbacks but the bottomline is that you might have to fix your templates/coding various places to be compatible.

 

- Screenshot (typo3.org extensions encoding)