Thread

What is wrong with having “index.php” in the URL string? Does it make a site load faster? Does it get better search engine rankings without “index.php?” Or, is it purely a matter of preference among OCD-like folks?

😊

We need the index.php in there, since this the central EE file through which everything else is routed, we can’t simply turn it off. Removing it from the URL is purely cosmetic.

Nice chat going on here! If it works “usually”, can someone tell me what the word” usually” includes i.e. the basics where it should work and so on,

Cheers:
- Tuittu

What is wrong with having “index.php” in the URL string? Does it make a site load faster? Does it get better search engine rankings without “index.php?” Or, is it purely a matter of preference among OCD-like folks?

I prefer to remove it for the following reasons:

- It looks ugly (just my humble opinion - I like my URLS nice and clean)
- Users get clues and orientation from the url, and having the index.php there is not helpful for them. (this is my biggie)
- Debatable, but possibly better for SEO

Removing it from the URL is purely cosmetic.

I think there are some pretty valid reasons to remove it. If nothing else when a client asks you to do it, that’s a valid reason 😉

That’s true, Brian, but again our reasoning for not including this by default or supporting it would mean that our support staff would suddenly have to become server environment gurus, as exemplified by this post.  Open source publishing tools like Drupal or WordPress can include a .htaccess file by default and think nothing of it, why?  Because they have no accountability to you to make sure it works, nor to even investigate and tell you why it doesn’t work on your server.

I prefer to remove it for the following reasons:

- It looks ugly (just my humble opinion - I like my URLS nice and clean)

That’s a legitimate design reason. As with many “design” decisions, it may come with a penalty, but legitimate nonetheless. It’s clean. It’s pretty. It’s elegant. But it’s not a functional improvement.

- Users get clues and orientation from the url, and having the index.php there is not helpful for them. (this is my biggie)

That may not be the case. I don’t recall the last time I entered the full URL for a specific page. Usually, it’s point and click, or copy and paste. Most users pay little attention to what’s in the URL string.

- Debatable, but possibly better for SEO

Probably not even debatable, or, certainly not for long. What’s in the URL string either matches content, titles, keywords to some extent or not. Otherwise, SEs don’t care whether there’s an index.php, or pagename.html, or .htm, or whatever. SEs want relevance in the string.

With EE as it stands now there are all kinds of reasons to just leave index.php alone, since it is important to the site’s function, and has no negatives other than preference or taste.

That said, other CMS’s have figured out a way to get around (sometimes; depends on the host server configuration) inclusion of index.php in the string. Joomla has the ability to attach .html to the end of content pages, which I like (preference), and remove the index.php from the string. The problem is consistency. It does not always work for every installation as it is dependent upon the hosts server configuration.  Granted, most good ones can handle .htaccess workarounds, but not all, thereby creating an inconsistency for users.

Back to SEO issues—EE’s handling of template names and template groups helps to build density within the URL string. If the index.php file can be simply renamed and work appropriately in “every” server configuration, then naming the index.php file to match template name and template group name adds more density to the URL string which search engines generally love.

It’s easy to argue that EE’s use of Title and URL Title is a gold mine for density.

For example, the Title of an article might be “How To Catch More Fish.”

The standard URL would be: “http://www.mysite.com/index.php/fish/lakes/how_to_catch_more_fish” which is produced by EE automatically.

I would like to see EE automatically (via an option) append a few additional keywords into the string to produce something like this, which is even more valuable to SEs because of density:

“http://www.mysite.com/index.php/fish/lakes/how_to_catch_more_fish_lake_michigan_catfish_boat_gear”

Of course, that can be accomplished by hand, but could result in errors. Perhaps EE could have a “tags” field. If anything is in the tags field it would be appended to the URL string. If not, not.

Leevi, that’s a great thing to have made, and I hope it helps many.

I had a look one level up on your site, at Leevi’s Expression Engine, and found a wealth of other things you’ve made.

I like the EE folk and what they make just fine, but this argumentation with customers about what customers should like is not a big help—jars each time.  It comes out here that they are worried about responsibility.  But helping where you can is good exercise of responsibility, and it is an old point of view now that ‘you can be perfect’. 

Why not just do as you did, and put up a solution that’s going to work for most people?  If it doesn’t in a case, you can say so, reference the Wiki, and probably have contributed to getting hard-headed hosters to change. 

I found that even this GoDaddy cheapo hosting I’m experimenting with (for a client that wants it) lets me set what I want to with .htaccess.  Yes, it is a little tricky - you have to force query strings, for no good reason that I can see.  But that’s exactly what an internal ExpressionEngine solution can manage - and options 0, 1, and 2 as well.  Can you imagine anyone but a programming-experienced person sorting that out?  While a solution like yours would make it simple.

Making it simple.  So it just works.  Adaptive software.  This is the only site on which I’ve become a bit of a pariah, and it is because I got irritated once, when I was in a business hurry, and just had to try to be a customer for once—and so I really needed this ‘just works’ adaptation. 

The feeling in that moment came because such things as this auto-remove-index.php can and should happen wherever they reasonably can, do so already with EE in lots of ways, and yet important parts of the EE presentation surface still lacks them.  Maybe times can change in Bend, Oregon, and various parts around, as they do everywhere else now.

I wish it so, for the good work of all at Ellis Labs to get its best due.

Regards,
Clive

Leevi Graham has come up with an GREAT extension for generating the .htaccess!

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/90365/

Thanks for the shout-out… So much for the quiet soft launch :p

Hope you all enjoy it and don’t forget to bookmark it and share on your social networks!

Cheers Leevi

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It comes out here that they are worried about responsibility.

Actually, not about responsibility as such, but being held responsible for and asked to support issues that may well lie beyond our control.

Why not just do as you did, and put up a solution that’s going to work for most people?  If it doesn’t in a case, you can say so, reference the Wiki, and probably have contributed to getting hard-headed hosters to change.

I rather think we did that; the rest is semantics. There is a solution in the wiki which works for most people. If you’ve still got problems, we have a very helpful community that, as a rule, is eager to help.

You can write off my problem as “incompatible host” but what kills me is the other site where I successfully renamed index.php was on the same host.

Surely there is some variable I’m missing, but that’s the point.
Too many variables for the non-guru.

And this IS something clients see and are sensitive to.
I don’t want to apologize for EE after I’ve spent so much effort convincing them it’s better than wordpress or any other CMS.
(or get too deep into abstract SEO jargon with them)

It could be a different server environment even with the same host.  That said, no one would be able to offer you any advice without seeing your .htaccess that you’re trying to use to diagnose possible problems.  If you’ve done everything correctly, then you would have the same situation if ExpressionEngine had created that .htaccess file for you.  Ryon, if you have a licensed version of ExpressionEngine, please log in with that account, post your problem to the forums, and email me a link to the thread.  I’ll be happy to make an exception for a frustrated new user.

I just bought a license for expression engine & have no problem keeping a .htaccess file up to date & use the include method suggested on the wiki.

The only thing I’m having a hard time with is that using the {path} & {title_permalink} variable puts it back into the url & there seems to be nothing I can do to get rid of that.

Can anybody tell me whether I’m missing something here? Maybe I’m just missing a setting in the control panel to get rid of that?

Thanks in advance for your help.

I just bought a license for expression engine & have no problem keeping a .htaccess file up to date & use the include method suggested on the wiki.

The only thing I’m having a hard time with is that using the {path} & {title_permalink} variable puts it back into the url & there seems to be nothing I can do to get rid of that.

Can anybody tell me whether I’m missing something here? Maybe I’m just missing a setting in the control panel to get rid of that?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Admin > System Preferences > General Configuration, “Name of your site’s index page”, set it to empty.

that was it. Thanks for the quick reply! Still trying to find my way around the EE control panel.