Question

I’ve been tasked with making an already existing e-commerce site SE friendly – which in this case means (amongst other things) letting the user change the URL for each page/product through the back end.

The site is an old asp site running on IIS6. I’ve started looking into http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF and http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/ , but I’m a bit dubious about how to let the user change the URLS without them going into the server and hard coding them.

Ionic’s Isapi Rewrite Filter runs from a .ini file, so I’m thinking that I will get the back end of the site to write to this ini file based on form inputs.

Does anyone have any experience or advice with regard to this?

edit:server is dedicated

Answer 1

By change URL fro each page, I think you mean change slug, or do you actually mean URL.

Slug:  www.somesite.com/products/{slug}
URL:   www.somesite.com/{url}

Here is how I would do it.

Give an original structure like this:

http://www.somesite.com/products.aspx?id=23

with an end goal of it to look like

http://www.somesite.com/products/the-product-to-be-sold

Or better yet

http://www.somesite.com/products/23/the-product-to-be-sold

I would create a rule that looks like this.

RewriteRule /products/([0-9]+)/(.*)  /products.asp?id=$1&slug=$2 [NC]

That way you don’t have to change anything, the name is in the URL for SEO optimization, and the ID is still there too.