[Mediawiki-l] Short URL reflecting wiki structure, no www

[Thomas Dalton]

> I am putting in a new wiki.  I have the install in the root of the
> domain.  Currently, my urls look like:
>
> http://mydomain.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

It might well be easiest to move the installation to a subfolder (/w/
seems to be standard). The problem with having it in the root
directory is that the url for the file "index.php" is the same as the
url for the article "index.php", which makes everything rather
complicated.

> First, I want to make sure that the www is never used in urls, and
> that if someone types in www.mydomain.com, the page that loads is
> mydomain.com.  I think have managed to stop jumping from www to no-www
> between loging in by using $wgServer = "http://mydomain.com"; in my
> localsettings.php page, but someone can still load a page by typing
> the www in the address bar.  Any thoughts on this one?

That seems fine to me.

> Finally, what I'd *prefer* would be to reflect the site's structure
> within the URL, and end up with something like:
>
> http://mydomain.com/category/subcategory/article
> or
> http://mydomain.com/category/article
>
> This obviously addresses those pages which belong in categories and/or
> subcategories only.

The problem is that the category structure doesn't really work like
that. An article can be in multiple categories, and there can only be
one article with each name, even in different categories. Having the
urls like that would be redundant, you would simply have to ignore the
category and subcategory parts, so why make your users type them in?