Simple URLs!

It took a bit of doing, but we finally got the site to use Simple URLs instead of that ugly title=[Page Name] on our MediaWiki (The Pet Wiki) based site. It wasn’t that difficult after we found the solution, but it took a ton of time to find it.

Since the site is on GoDaddy, we are unable to get to the root directory to make modifications. There is a page in the MediaWiki manual that says what to do (Manual:Short URL/wiki/Page title — GoDaddy Shared Linux Subdomain). We followed the instructions, but it still didn’t work. After looking all over the web in vane, the discussion page for the manual had the answer. You need to add

$wgUsePathInfo = “/”;

to LocalSettings.php as well.

The old URLs seem to still be working. The next question is how do you do 301 redirects for the old URLs out there? We keep looking for an answer, but haven’t found anything about it yet. On the one hand, the Simple URLs are better for SEO, but on the other hand, are we going to lose points for having multiple URLs to the same content. I’ll keep looking for a solution…