Understanding Aliases and URLs in Site Planner

How Standard Pages Get Assigned URLs in Site Planner

Any time you’re building a web page in Site Planner manually, you’ll be asked to give your page a name, a title, and an alias.  You’ll notice as you’re typing the name that the two blank fields below it, the title and the page alias, are filling in what you type too.  The alias may look simplified compared to the other two blanks.  That’s because SiteStacker has an alias sanitation process that changes spaces into dashes and removes any special characters, like “!,*,%, and $”.  

The alias, now sanitized, becomes a part of your web page’s URL.  In the example below, the address used to navigate to the page you’ve created is yourwebsitename.org/this-is-an-example, because it’s the alias that’s used to locate the web page on your site.

A user right-clicks and adds a page.  As the user types a name for the page, the alias below replaces the spaces with dashes and removes special characters. 

If you’ve worked with Site Planner you already know that you often organize your web pages with subfolders.  By default, the subfolder’s name/alias has no bearing on the URL of your web page.  You have the option to add an alias to the subfolder though, just like the aliases on your web pages (right-click and “edit” the subfolder).  Doing this changes the URL of your web page to include the subfolder’s alias too.

For example, if a page called “Become a Hero” is in a subfolder with the alias “get-involved”, its default URL would be “yourwebsitename.org/get-involved
/become-a-hero.”  Note that the aliases of subfolders are not automatically sanitized.  It’s recommended to replace spaces with dashes and leave out special characters as best practice.

A user adds an alias to a subfolder to demonstrate the changes it will make to a URL.

Aliases can always be customized on static pages, and folder structure can usually be adjusted to accommodate most breadcrumb situations.  There may require some manual adjustments and unique folder layouts needed to accomplish this.

How Dynamic Pages Get Assigned URLs in Site Planner

For dynamic pages (like blog posts, projects, and other automatically-created pages), your final URL will be determined by the alias of the detail page as well as the alias of the content item itself.   The detail page is where the content has been assigned in Site Planner.

For example, in Site Planner we can create a page and name it “Blog” as the detail page for all blog posts.  Since the title gets sanitized for the alias, the URL to navigate here so far will say “blog”.  As long as the page is not contained in any subfolders that have been assigned an alias, the first part of its URL becomes “yourwebsitename.org/blog/”.  

A user references the 06 articles folder on a web page with the alias blog.

From there, each blog post in the “06 Articles” folder will have its alias appended to the end to create the URL.  If you create a blog post called “My Awesome Blog Post” now,  the full URL to navigate to the blog post will be “yourwebsitename.org/blog/my-awesome-blog-post.”

  The alias of a blog article my-awesome-blog-post will combine with the folder blog to create the final URL.