Creating Short URLs – MediaWiki – Version 1.10.0

Yeah, this took me a little while to figure out. I started last night and noticed that the clock was ticking rather quickly. I had to move away from the computer…MOVE AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.

One of the most important things you can do for any website is to create pretty URLs for your pages, or what MediaWiki calls, “Short URLs.” The technique basically turns…

http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

into something more like…

http://www.example.com/wiki/Main_Page

You get the idea of how short urls get rid of all the ugly ?, = and &. URLs like that are hard to remember and search engines just don’t like them. Google recently mentioned that they treat both ugly and pretty URLs the same, but I haven’t found any evidence of that.

So, how to get pretty URLs (or short URLs) in your Wiki? I will tell you that I tried each and every one of MediaWiki’s suggestions and none of them worked for me. It’s strange, because it almost seems like there is no continuity between the developers of this software. There are so many suggestions for so many things. I suppose that might be because of the various server configurations of so many users.

I searched in many web forums out there and came up with a solution that worked for me. I found it here and this is it…

My wiki is installed in /public_html/wiki and the clean url for my main page now comes up as http://www.mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page.

I added the following to .htaccess file located in /public_html.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^wiki/(.+)$ /wiki/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

I also changed (or added) the following in LocalSettings.php located in /public_html/wiki.

##### ADDED FOR SHORT URLS #####

##### ADDED FOR SHORT URLS #####

Thanks to trailville for this one. Just remember, when using this method, be sure to only have one .htaccess file, and keep it located in the root directory.