Search Engine Friendly URLs

Out of the box, Zenario displays pages in the form zenariosite.com/index.php?cID=page-alias.

That's for easiest install, and we do it to avoid problems with Apache rewriting during the installation. But it's not friendly for users or for search engines.

So you should make a small change to your site, so that pages have URLs that look like zenariosite.com/page-alias, or where pages are deeper in the menu they look like zenariosite.com/products/some-category/sub-category/page-alias.

Friendly URLs are not only more likely to be indexed by a search engine, they are more likely to be remembered by a human.

Concepts

With Zenario, every content item has a unique numeric ID (which is permanent), and a content type, for example:

https://zenariosite.com/index.php?cID=6&cType=html

where "6" in this example is the content item ID, and "html" is the content type.

Zenario encourages administrators to make an alias for every content item, which is a unique site-wide, and which can contain alphanumeric characters. So when creating a content item with an alias it normally looks like:

https://zenariosite.com/index.php?cID=some-alias

Let's see how to make that look more friendly.

Enabling mod_rewrite

mod_rewrite is an Apache module, which you will need to enable if not done so previously.

If you're not sure, try enabling it:

$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
Module rewrite already enabled

Then check the virtual host file for your Zenario site. It should contain something like this:

<Directory /path/to/zenario/public_html/>
  Options +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews -Indexes
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted
</Directory>

Ensure that AllowOverride is set to All (and not set to None), because Apache needs to pay attention to the file in Zenario's home directory called .htaccess.

Then go to Organizer, Configuration->Site settings and find the panel "URL format, aliases and XML sitemap":

Check "Use friendly URLs", and also "Use friendly URLs in admin mode" for ease of use while editing.

You can make Zenario use a suffix such as .html, but you may find it neater to select no suffix.

If you check "Show menu structure in friendly URLs", then a deeper level page (i.e. level 2 or deeper in the menu navigation) will have slashes in its URL path, with the upper levels being the aliases of the content items above the item in the menu hierarchy.