Configuring RealURL

Today I found out about a tool to help configure RealURL.

1. Download and install the extension aeurltool.
2. Refresh the back end (Log out and log back in).
3. Click on URL Tool.
4. Set up your 404 page handling to go to any page on your site if you want.
5. Select Real URL configuration.
6. Load the Default configuration.
7. Click on Use this RealURL configuration.
8. Save.

All done! Now check out your front end and see your new URLs.

The default configuration uses the one that was posted on news.typo3.org.

Oh, and BTW, this solves the problem mentioned in my previous post about RealURL. Now URLs will have a .html on the end.

Using Real URLs

Who likes to see URLs that have a bunch of ?s, &s, numbers, and other unreadable stuff? I don’t! In fact, I get somewhat suspicious of them, even knowing much of the behind the scenes stuff that makes the work. I still don’t like them, and Typo3 is driven by them…

RealURL to the rescue! It works pretty well right “out of the box”, but there are a couple of things to do to get it set up.

1. Go to the extension manager and install the RealURL extension.
2. Go to your template and edit the TypoScript, adding these lines:

   ## RealURL Setup
config.simulateStaticDocuments = 0
config.baseURL = http://www.rosinabignall.com/site/
config.tx_realurl_enable = 1
config.prefixLocalAnchors = all
##

Note: Change your baseURL to match your site.

Easy enough, wasn’t it? There’s a lot that you can configure to change how the URLs are presented, but if you’re happy with the default (as I am at the moment), then this will do it.

If you read the docs, you’ll find the lines a bit different. Apparently the baseURL line in Typo3 has changed for security reasons, but the docs haven’t been updated yet. And the prefixLocalAnchors line is mentioned in a different place.

Now, if you add an alias to each of your pages, you will have URLs like this: http://RosinaBignall.com/site/alias/

Note that the trailing slash (/) on the URL is very important to RealURL.  http://RosinaBignall.com/site/alias will not work.  Since I type URLs by hand frequently and usually leave off the trailing / , I find this rather annoying.

I use RealURL with both Learner’s Village and RosinaBignall.com

Future work:  Figure out how to make RealURL work both with and without the trailing / .