CMS Jam Content Management Systems: News and Resources

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite easy CMS is CMS Made Simple (CMSMS). One of the reasons I love it is because it can create search-friendly URLs. What is that and why does it matter?

What is a search-friendly URL?

A search-friendly URL is one that makes it easy for search engines to index and understand what a page is all about. For example, www.yoursite.com/blue-widgets/ tells Google, Yahoo!, etc. that the page blue-widgets is about “blue widgets”.

Why does it matter?

Search-friendly URLs gives a page an extra chance to rank well for that phrase. Many CMS’s will create URLs like this:

www.yoursite.com/id=128483&catno=82746&colid=7373

That makes it just a little harder for that page to rank for “blue widgets” than it would for the search-friendly URL. In addition, search-friendly URLs are also visitor-friendly, and that’s always a plus.

So, in general, search-friendly URLs are usually implemented by utilizing a module on Apache servers called “mod_rewrite”. (You don’t need really need to understand that at all. I just mention it as an FYI). CMSMS, in particular, allows you to control this mod_rewrite action by editing two files. And while CMS Made Simple has documentation for editing these files here, it can be a little daunting for anyone without any experience to read that page. The actual implementation is actually very easy, however, so I decided to give you the Quick Guide instead. You can read the real documentation later if you just want to expand your horizons.

So, here’s all you need to do after installing CMS Made Simple in order to get search-friendly URLs for all your pages.

1. Create an .htaccess file consisting of 4 lines and upload to the server.

Open notepad or any text editor on your computer and copy/paste the following into a new text document. (Don’t use Microsoft Word, please.)


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?page=$1 [QSA]


Now click on File / Save and save the document to your desktop with the name “.htaccess”

Notice that I put .htaccess in quotes. You should too. Why? Because without the quotes, it may save it with .txt at the end of the name, and you don’t want that. The name MUST BE .htaccess (nothing before the period, and nothing after htaccess).

2. Edit config.php to match the following three lines and upload to the server.

Now, again using Notepad or text editor, edit the config.php file that came with the install files of CMSMS. Look for the URL Settings section of the file. Find the following lines and edit them so that they are set to true, false, and true, respectively, as shown below.


$config['assume_mod_rewrite'] = true;
$config['internal_pretty_urls'] = false;
$config['use_hierarchy'] = true;


Upload both of those files to your server (in the root directory, or the same directory where config.php currently lives), and your new site will be using search-friendly URLs from then on.