|
|
CityDesk 2.0-Documentation
How Article Names Become URLsWhen CityDesk publishes your site, it will try to use the article name you specified to create the URL. As a simple example, if the article is named Products, you will get a URL with the name Products.html. As another example, your site probably contains an article named index which will be published as index.html. Most web servers are configured to send the index.html file to visitors who do not request a particular file, for example, if they go to http://www.example.com.
Here's a little bit more detail on the process of how CityDesk generates a file name based on the article name. In most cases, you'll find that you don't have to worry about this because CityDesk almost always generates satisfactory names on its own.
First, you may be wondering: Where does the .html part come from? It actually comes from the template that you chose to use with the article. If you're creating web sites, most of your templates will be set to generate .html files. However, some people may use other file formats such as WML or XML, and they will want create .wml or .xml files. This can be controlled in the Templates dialog.
CityDesk won't try to create files containing characters that are not legal in URLs or on certain web servers. For example, spaces
(" ") are not allowed in URLs. If you have an article namedCustomer Service (with a space), it will be published as CustomerService.html.According to the international standard for URLs, only unaccented English letters (A-Z) can be used in URLs. In particular, accented characters (such as é) cannot be used in URLs. CityDesk will remove any accents before publishing. For example, Olé will be published as Ole.html.
Any non-European characters will also be removed. If your article name is entirely in a non-European language such as Japanese or Hebrew, nothing will be left. In this case, CityDesk will publish your articles with generated names such as fog-1.html, fog-2.html, fog-3.html, etc.
If you have two or more articles which would result in the same file name in the same folder, for example, CustomerService and Customer Service, CityDesk will add a number to the end of one of them to make them unique.
If your article name is too long (longer than 25 characters), CityDesk will shorten it to avoid super-long URLs. For example, This Article Name Is Very Long And A Bit Incovenient would be published as ThisArticleNameIsVeryLong.html.
You can put comments in your article name by surrounding them by ( and ). Anything between parentheses will not be used in the generated file name. For example, you could name an article Customer Service (Jim Needs To Check This) and it will be published as CustomerService.html. That's a handy way to leave interesting notes to yourself about articles. The nice thing about this is that you can change the comment without changing the generated file name, so any outside sites that refer to this URL will continue to work.
Compatibility Note:
This note applies only to people who used CityDesk version 1.0.23 or an earlier version.
CityDesk version 1.0.23 did not allow you to control file names in this way. It generated article names of the form fog##########.html using a 10-digit number. When you import a site into the current version of CityDesk, all existing articles will continue to use the old fog##########.html names. This is for backwards compatibility, to insure that if there are already links pointing to pages in your site on the Internet, those links will continue to work. Any newly created articles will use the new naming scheme. If you are not concerned with this backwards compatibility and would prefer to use the real names, rename each of your articles once (and then rename them back) which will cause them to lose their fog##########.html name for good.
©Copyright 2001-2003 Fog Creek Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.