Does anyone have the DNN Masters URL Rewriter module installed with AS. I have followed all the instructions for setting up the Vanity URL's for AS and as soon as I add the 404.aspx file to the root directory, DNN Masters stops working and can no longer be accessed. I have turned off the AS vanity URL's until I can work out what is going on !

Please add the string "|404\.aspx" at the end of "Do not rewrite" entries in SEO module Globals option.

And one more thing - is the seo module placed on a page named 404 ?
If so, rename the page.

mmmm. that didnt seem to work. Any other ideas

Thanks Chris

+ 1

Has anyone setup vanity urls on a PowerDNN host?

We are told to do everything through Plesk, how do I configure IIS?????

Post and ye shall find.

I just found the custom error option under Plesk; it's under ASP.net configuration.

I just configured vaity urls on the following setup: Any thoughts

same problem here! no answers! please help is urgent! i followed the steps and nothing happen you can take a look at http://www.puromtb.com/RedSocial/So...mmary.aspx im running AS 1.6 thanks

i have not configured this yet! using powerdnn.com as hosting! please i need help from you guys the developers! this option is very important i believed it was out of the box and not this painful process!

Hi Anthony,
We have been trying to help you. I updated your ticket within 10 minutes of your reply on the 5/10 and you just replied today. Configuring vanity URLs requires access to your site beyond DotNetNuke. This means access at the hosting/IIS level. That is way beyond our normal support. Now in your last ticket update you said to configure it for you or give you a refund. You need to provide more information in your support ticket other than links to your site.

I understand you are frustrated, but we can only do so much from within DotNetNuke. Our ability to help you also depends on the information you provide. Please update your support ticket and provide screen captures of your hosting control panel settings where you configured the custom 404.aspx page, the actual 404.aspx page and your web.config file with passwords removed. Also include a screen capture of the main settings page in Active Social Control panel. If you have problems with the attachments on our help desk, please email me directly. willm - at - activemodules.com.

Thanks,
Will

I updated the ticket with all the information you asked! i hope you can help me out! the last reply was not very helpful having me to check the guide and the hosting company again told me that only you guys can help since they are not the developers so please understand me you are the only people can help me out! i now this is pretty simple for you but not for me! i really thought this was out of the box! and i will suggest to try to add it out of the box is too bad to have to do all these things! thanks.

Anthony,

If you are using URL master, you can easily do the vanity url stuff with the it, without messing up with your IIS or whatever. However, it is only limited to profiles. You cannot do that with groups.

Check this out: http://www.ifinity.com.au/Blog/Entr...Url-Master

Hope this helps, a little bit.

Unless URL Master's documentation is out of date, you still have to make changes to IIS in order have vanity URLs the same way as Active Social.
http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/...ons+in+IIS

Oh yeah, right. So vanity urls do not have extensions? Well you can easily do www.website.com/activemodules.aspx with urlmaster but not www.website.com/activemodules

Sorry about the misinformation.

I'm trying to set up Vanity URLs on Groups and I am not having much luck and am a bit confused after reading different forum posts. In this thread - http://www.activemodules.com/Commun...aspx#29324 - dated Jan 2010 - the 404 custom page in IIS is no longer required so we don't need to touch IIS.

But this thread has got posts from March in it talking about IIS changes - can someone please confirm - on IIS 6 - do you need to make IIS changes or not? I downloaded the latest Vanity URL PDF and that still mentions the 404.

I have tried it with a custom 404 and without it and neither work (they both show either the custom 404 error page OR the default 404 error page) - it looks like the HTTPHandler is not redirecting to the group.

Ideas please? Who is using a custom 404 and who isn't on IIS6?

ActiveSocial.com is running IIS6 and not using a 404 page. If you don't use the 404.aspx page then you need to setup a wildcard mapping in IIS. This is a good article that explains how to setup wildcard mapping in IIS 6.

Ok, thanks. Does that mean that I have to run my whole site without extensions if I want to use Vanity URLs in AS? (it's not a problem, it was on my list to look at in the future, but what I mean is that I can't just make the Group URLs extensionless, and I can't use Vanity URLs without removing all extensions - have I got it right?)

If you use the AS Vanity URL's, only users and/or groups will become extensionless. If you currently have extensions for other urls, they will still work. IE: .aspx

Rodney, be aware. I've been testing with UM which I believe you use. My goal was to have UM handle vanity urls for users and AS handle vanity urls for groups. In the AS control panel, I had vanity urls inactive for users but turned on for groups and could not get the two to work together. UM can handle vanity urls for users, but the AS vanity options must be turned off. Thus, groups are not handled with the vanity option. So, I reverted back to the AS vanity.

If you go down this path, or if anyone else has, and are successful, please chime in.

Thanks Jeff. I seem to have UM and Vanity URLs working on DEV now but I am not going to be able to go live with it as my old URLs do not 301 redirect (got over 1000 groups). So I'm just writing a module to do a 301 redirect AS URL format with a friendly group name. At some point I'll have to attempt this again when I've had a think about it.

My limited experience is that AS handles the vanity URLs better than iFinity's UrlMaster. I have UM set up to do extensionless URLs and AM vanity URLs and it seems to work fine. I actually like AMs ability to prefix the URLs. With UM you could have a user name themselves after a page and run into clashes. For example, what if a use named themselves "login" and you had a extensionless page: mysite.com/login UM would have to decide what to do and in my testing it was spotty behaviour. I have a page /help and created a user "help" and it would not rewrite properly.

It makes sense to use AS as much as possible on AS pages (and this is my aim ultimately) - but with 1000s of pages of already indexed content and 301 support for old URLs I have to stick to UM until it's matured unfortunately.

Have you considered using something like IsapiRewrite? it's a great tool to use for something like what you describe. You can have it use a regex to detect the old link and then replace it with 301 to the new link.

Jeff, I am trying to do the same. I want to use UM for user profile vanity url and AS for group's vanity url. I have managed the vanity part but working on getting rid of the prefix from the group url. I have managed to get rid of prefix for profile url with UM but it still has the .aspx extension. I think to get rid of the prefix in group vanity url, I will have to disable UM from rewriting group url. I have no idea how to turn profile url into vanity url with UM but I haven't searched for it really. I forgot why I am writing so much! Anyway, did you get it to work as you want?

FWIW UM ran fine for me with the vanity urls and no extension (IIS 6) but it did not offer the prefix /users/ that I wanted to use. this was required because if didn't want someone to try an hijack an existing (or future) page. For example, if someone had the Displayname = Login, UM would want to rewrite to mysite.com/Login.

IMO the AF rewriter works much better