We’ve been relatively quiet here for a while, and it’s because we’ve been digging in and doing a lot of fun stuff to make you happier than ever. Our team is really starting to gel and find our groove, which means some truly excellent things are on their way.
I’ll start off right at the beginning by letting you to know that in the midst of a simmering summer, we’ve worked to a new cool release. Guys, URL Adapter 1.4 is out!
What's New?
If you value quality, innovative technology and a user experience that isn’t matched anywhere else on the market, then you should get URL Adapter 1.4, especially considering that now flawlessly integrates with some of the most popular DNN blogs, news and directories modules, such as: SunBlogNuke, EasyDNNnews, News Article, DNNInfo Classifieds and Property Agent. Cool isn't it?
Why Would You Care About These Integrations?
Well, as you know, URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site.
A common scenario where a greater flexibility with URLs is needed is when you want to restructure the pages within your blog and news modules that URL Adapter integrates with (or within your DNN portal), and you want to ensure that people who have bookmarked old URLs don't break when you move pages around. URL Adapter enables you to transparently forward requests to the new page location without breaking browsers.
In another train of thoughts, URL Adapter can help you to improve the search relevancy of pages on your blog and news module (or DNN portal) with search engines like Google. Specifically, URL Adapter can make it easier to embed common keywords into the URLs of the pages on your DNN portal, which can often increase the chance of someone clicking your link.
Moving from using querystring arguments to instead use fully qualified URL's can also in some cases increase your priority in search engine results.
In a world where search engines increasingly drive traffic to sites, extracting any little improvement in your page ranking can yield very good ROI to your business.
What Else?
URL Adapter 1.4 introduces a ton of improvements and bug fixes, making it a stable and feature-rich version! Here’s a quick breakdown of what's new:
- Implemented integration with SubBlogNuke, EasyDNNnews, News Article, DNNInfo Classifieds and Property Agent modules
- Implemented new mechanism to rebuild the queue based on database triggers
- Implemented Priority Rules - so one can choose either rule come before other rules or after
- Implemented SSL portal and tab options
- Implemented providers engine that is triggered by the presence of some modules on a page and some query string params
- Implemented UserProvider that handles generating user friendly URLs
- Added activation error message on the page when URL Adapter is not activated
- Added more logging and optimized speed by caching IsActivated
- Added primary key for Rules tables
- Rebuild index if empty and load it all at once in cache
- Changed SafeWord option to disable the index permanently - it can then be re-enabled from admin
- Changed primary key to guid for index table to avoid overflow
- Skip enforcing locale for root domain
- Removed message when module is not activated - and just default to standard URL rewriter;
- Fixed respecting the homepage
- Fixed handling DNN URLs
- Fixed appending .aspx extension
- Fixed advanced rules no not cache when absolute URLs are used, because the cache doesn't take into account domain names
- Fixed localization to take into account the browser language, cookie, user profile
- Fixed serving the correct homepage when setting is set to Root
- Fixed conflicting licensing with DNN API Endpoint
- Fixed URL providers to work when placed on the homepage
- Fixed bug related with SmithCart login
- Fixed ordering advanced rule
- Fixed performance issue caused by non tab related URLs
- Fixed defaulting to standard DNN URLs when module is not activated
- Fixed getting custom URLs per portal
- Fixed serving .HTML custom URLs
- Fixed handling URLs like /tabid/123/param1/value1/default.aspx
- Fixed custom URLs wiping the index
- Fixed rules that were changing existing targets instead of creating a new one, which resulted in redirect loops
- Fixed missing extensions
- Fixed getting extension on .NET 3.5
- And dozens more
What are you waiting for? Go ahead, download URL Adapter 1.4 and give the new features a try and tell us about your experience. We’d love to know what you think!
Wrapping Up
We want to personally thank all of you for your support. And I want to give one more shoutout to Jeron, Steve, Richard, Jerry, Nathan for their patience and tireless efforts to help us making our modules better.
We haven’t done everything perfect. Not even close. But we have done our best, and are 100% committed to continuing to do our best. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without our amazing clients, and we’re not going to forget that any time soon. Actually, ever :-).