What Is The Tidy Website Link Doing?

Hello Community… Would value input regarding what the RapidWeaver “Tidy Website Link” is actually doing. I now fully understand the recommendation to place each page in its own folder as an index.html page but what is RW doing when I have this setting selected?

Kind Regards,
Dave

@TeamSDA

It says what it does right under the red circle :wink:

Any page that has it’s own folder and has a page name with index.htm, index.html, index.php will be removed from the link because the server will serve these files first (in most cases) without them having to be specified as part of the link.

So specifically, it is mostly used in the navigation bar of any Theme to remove the index.html/php from the actual link

Brad

Thanks Brad… And yes I saw that. I may be wrong here but I thought displaying the index.html portion of a url was controlled either through .htaccess or other server configuration. Trying to get my head wrapped around what RW is doing via this setting and still not understanding. Apologies if I am missing something super basic.

Would value a little further clarity,
Dave

@TeamSDA

ok, let me try again (There is a video on it if you are a subscriber and in the free section too I think)

when RapidWeaver exports the site it generates the html for all the pages in your project.

Your navigation system is

/index.html - Home Page for site
/blog/index.html - Blog Page
/store/index.php - Online Store
/about/index.html - About you page

If you have this box checked and publish your site, part of what RapidWeaver does is change the navber links

from http://www.yoursite.com/index.html to http://www.yoursite.com
from http://www.yoursite.com/blog/index.html to http://www.yoursite.com/blog/
etc

You can define the server root filename/extension (on some hosts) in the .htaccess file, but not all, generally speaking index.php/.html are the defaults anymore.

Does that help?

Brad

1 Like

Awesome description there @Turtle

This article refers. An oldie but a real goodie!
https://www.nimblehost.com/wpblog/2012/11/why-cruftless-links-are-better/

4 Likes

WOW! That’s a really good reference to have on hand, thanks @kryten

Brad

Thanks Guys… Totally get the part about naming all pages index and placing them in folders with relevant names using dashes to separate each word but did learn a new term, Cruftless Links. Thanks for the article Stuart, so clear and helpful.

Please be patient as I want to be sure I got this. So if I am understanding this correctly, the setting, Tidy Website Links, has to do with how RapidWeaver publishes it’s links. After looking at pages published with this setting ticked on I can now see how the <a> tag has the page name removed. Is this correct and what the setting is for?

Again apologies if this should have been obvious, just could not get my head wrapped around it.

Kind Regards,
Dave

1 Like

@TeamSDA

You got it Dave!

Brad