Hi there,
I have just began building with MovableType after some terrible experiences with some other systems - so far I'm loving it!
I'm just wondering if there is any way to have some cleaner blog entry and page urls - without having a file extension at the end?
I understand that the actual files need extensions as they are static - however, is there a way to map url's to them and change how mt behaves to link to the clean URL as opposed to the page with the extension?
Thanks for your help
Reported on Movable Type 5
Hi Aron,
There is nothing clean on having the generated files without extension. If you remove the extension, you will have to configure your server to interpret as html all the pages without any extension.
Alternatively you could remove the extension and switch from static publishing to dynamic publishing, but in that case you will lose a key feature of movable type.
So what I would advice is to keep the extension as .html. If you need to, you could even run PHP coding inside your .html files (setting the server to interpret them as .php).
Using the .html extension could discourage attackers, or at least won't give them any clue about the technology you're using ;)
Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru
----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant
Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner
http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------
Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/
Thank you for your help Mihai!
I don't really want to use dynamic publishing as I'd hate to loose one of the main reasons I moved to MT.
I'll take your advice on board and will consider the best solution for my sites!
You're welcome, Aron!
You can have cruft-free URLs with MT, it's mainly a matter of configuring your web server to serve those as HTML files by default (it depends on which web server you're using, not on MT).
This said, it's pure geek perfectionism really, nobody *needs* cruft-free URLs and most people will recognize that a URL ending with .html is most likely a web page (usually what they're looking for). Also, I remember Matt Cutts from Google advising against using extension-less URLs for pages, as their search engine makes assumptions based on the extension.
Bottom line: risks are greater than the hypothetical benefits (if there are any benefits).
There are definitely no benefits Francois, so I would encourage the user to simply use the .html extension :)