URL Rewriting in Enterprise Server

With the release of Version 1.2.9 of Enterprise Server, you are now able to have the Knowledge Base rewrite it's internal URLs, so that they are spiderable and are easier to understand.  For example, on the www.microforge.net website, we are now able to access a knowledge base article using the URL http://www.microforge.net/kb/64 rather than the somewhat less friendly http://www.helpforge.net/ENTAdmin/EntISAPI.dll/wpFaqArticle?Id=64.

Most search engines will have trouble spidering URLs containing query parameters such as "?Id=...".  By rewriting the URLs we can make the Knowledge Base much friendlier for search engines and for linking directly to knowledge base articles in emails, web pages or other knowledge base articles.

You will notice in this instance that we are using cross-domain rewrites.  That is we are accessing the Knowledge Base on domain www.helpforge.net via an URL rewrite on domain www.microforge.net.  This is made possible via two fairly easy steps:

1. Including the following settings to the  settings.ini file of Enterprise Server:
   • Article URL Format=http://www.microforge.net/kb/
   • Category URL Format=http://www.microforge.net/kb/category/
   • TOC URL Format=http://www.microforge.net/kb
2. Adding the following rewrite rule within a <directory> block to the Apache config on www.microforge.net:
   • RewriteEngine on
   • RewriteRule ^kb[/]?$ http://www.helpforge.net/EntAdmin/EntISAPI.dll/wpFAQ [P]
   • RewriteRule ^kb/category/([0-9]+)$ http://www.helpforge.net/EntAdmin/EntISAPI.dll/wpFAQCategory?Id=$1 [P]
   • RewriteRule ^kb/([0-9]+)$ http://www.helpforge.net/EntAdmin/EntISAPI.dll/wpFAQArticle?Id=$1 [P]

For more information on Apache URL rewriting, please google for mod_rewrite. If you are resticted to an IIS/ISAPI solution you can find rewriting software for that, too.  For example, do a google for "isapi url rewrite".