Creating meaningful URLs for your site
You can create constant URLs for portal pages that are easy to remember and therefore more user friendly. You can publish these URLs externally for users your portal users.
The URL Mapping portlet allows you to create constant URLs for portal pages. You can publish these URLs externally and thereby make them available for portal users to access your portal pages. As you create the URLs, you can define human readable names for them. These can be easily remembered and are therefore more user friendly. For example, a computer store that uses the portal could create a Mapping URL products/hardware/laptops for the page on which their laptop product line is advertised. This URL can be appended to a portal prefix that was defined by the customer, for example http://www.supercomputers.com/wps/portal/products/hardware/laptops.
Clicking on such URLs from outside of the portal takes the user to the required portal page. Users can also combine several mapped contexts into the representation of a full valid URL, type that into the address field of the browser and get to the portal page.
The given URLs are arranged in a hierarchical tree of contexts. The users can then map those contexts to pages. The hierarchical tree of the contexts is independent from that of the portal resources and navigation. This has the following advantages:
- You can map the URLs to portal pages in any way you like.
- You can administer the access permissions for users to individual contexts.
- If you change the name of a URL, the portal applies that name change to all mapping URLs that are affected by the change. Example: a change from
products/hardware/...toproducts/computer-hardware/...