Search Engine Optimisation

The portal framework can be used with a URL rewriting engine like mod_rewrite to get nice SEO URLs. You need to set rewriteEngine to yes in the portal configuration file and add a rewrite rule to the rewrite engine.

By default SEO URLs start with a go/ prefix, but this can also be eliminated by using a set of rewrite conditions. There is an example .htaccess file for apache in the config directory, which can use used with standard Speck SEO URLs (though we'd recommend adding a rule within a virtual host directive). There is also a speck_rewrite.common file which can be included in your vhost directives if you want SEO URLs without a prefix.

Speck uses UUIDs to identify content items, and when viewing a content item in full on a web site, there is normally a UUID in the URL (even when the rewrite engine URLs are enabled). You can use the seoIdentifiers portal configuration setting to tell templates to use labels rather than UUIDs in URLs where possible. Both the articles and events templates included with the portal demo / boilerplate application will use labels rather than UUIDs when generating URLs if seoIndentifiers is true.

TODO: info on how spPage builds the title and meta tags.