So I’m relatively new to RapidWeaver Elements, but I’m really liking it. But I’ve got a few issues, and this is one:
Your menu name items subsequently become the directory names (and hence url pointers) for all of your main subdirectories, which in and of itself should be fine. However, if you happen to want to display a word as a part of your menu that has accent marks, since these things are not commonly used in web URLs, it seems that Elements strips out the accents and replaces it with either nothing or hyphens. So, for instance, in my case, the word Résumé, which if you’re being particular, has two accent marks, as you can see, one over each E. I can’t use that name and have that subdirectory be called resume. Instead, it renames it to R-sum. Now, if I’m giving somebody a link to my Résumé page on my website, telling them to go to my-site.whatever/r-sum is a little absurd.
Is there potentially a way to decouple this behavior in a useful way or build something into Elements so that when it does translate the accent marks, it just reverses it to the basic version of that letter without accent marks instead of either removing the characters or replacing them with a hyphen? This would be awesome. I’m not a fan of having my Résumé page be called Resume, because I’m not resuming anything.
I’m not sure if this is a known issue. I’m also not sure how many people add accent marks to their menu items, so it may not have ever come up as an issue. So, hopefully someone can help.
I maintain a website for a local canoe club here in Hawai’i, and trust me, they are very particular about correctly accenting characters. I have no problems doing this for my menu items, but I do not use the accents when writing the folder name for the page so that the URL is web safe.
Elements is not specifying the format of the folder name; I wrote that explicitly in my settings. Did you just leave it blank, and is that why you are having a problem? It is always a good idea to define a folder name, as then you are directly controlling what the URL to the page will look like.
Okay, I think I misunderstood something about how it works. Because I didn’t go in and do any deliberate changes in the information box for the page I’m on, It assumed the folder name based on the menu name.
[I’m still learning this. I’m new to Elements. I’ve literally only been using it for like a week and a half, maybe.]
So what you’re saying is begin by naming the page on the left with the naming convention that I’m interested in the menu being. Then go into the info section on the right for the details, and where it’s got the folder option (which I only just now became aware of), name it whatever I need it to be there, which would obviously be the same word, no accents. Honestly, that’s very simple, and I had no idea. That’s why I asked. That’s awesome, and thank you.
The other reason you want to specify the folder name is because otherwise it will default to the URL ending in “index.html” instead of a more meaningful name. This can result in other problems.
Well, from my testing, if any of the names don’t end in index.html on all of your different items that you have actual sub-directories for (menu items especially) that you want to use as links to give out, then you can’t just say something like, in my case, ‘glenallen.art/resume’. I have to tell them to put in resume.html, or whatever it is I renamed it to. I just tried it, and when I tested the site, that normal kind of shortcut that you could use wasn’t there anymore.
So, I guess I’m confused about what you mean. But otherwise, yes, it’s good to be able to specify the folder name, especially because the way that it was renaming my stuff because of those special characters was just screwing everything up, and I was not gonna have any easy way to tell somebody how to get to a particular area of my site directly in an easy way.
The reason you want to specify the folder name is because then you DO NOT have to append the HTML or PHP at the end of the URL, as the folder will point to the index.html file automatically.
So if your folder is named “resume,” then the URL would just be “website.com/resume/”
