CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi,

I want to rebuild an existing website with cmsms (manually, I don't have any access to the old system). Since the site has a good search engine ranking, I want to preserve all indexed URLs.

The site has more than 100 blog articles. I use LISE as a blog system. LISE allows me to enter custom item URLs for each entry.

Problem: Most of the indexed URLs contain some double hyphens, like this: news/detail.120.my--detail--url.

LISE doesn't accept these URLs and automatically overwrites them with single hyphens. While this is normally welcome and useful, it's a disadvantage in this exceptional case, as the URLs should remain permanent.

Is there an easy way to get LISE to accept these "invalid" URLs without doing hundreds of redirects or any rewritings via .htacces?

Note: On the old website both versions are accessible. With double and single hyphens. But unfortunately, Google only indexed the ones with the double hyphens.

Other than editing the module's code to skip the reformatting, I think your options would be:

• edit them in the DB after creation (you could perhaps put in a specific character to then do a search/replace for)
• export items as csv, update the fields, then import
• add a different character then use url rewriting (probably not the best seo option)

I haven't tested any of these, just spitballing.

Thank you.

option 2 sounds like a possibility as long as LISE accepts the updated fields.

Changing the URL via export/import works, but only as long as I don't want to edit the item. As soon as I open the item and try to save a change, I get the invalid item URL message again.

This is the first time this custom URL feature has been truly useful to me. Unfortunately, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

URLs with double hyphens may not be very elegant and useful, but are they really that "invalid" to ban them?

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Without editing the module code, any workaround is only going to stay in place until you edit the item. I don't think the intention was ever to "ban" double hyphens, it's just a feature to keep things clean and was probably in the original List-It module from ~15 years ago. I think it's fair to say you have a relatively edge case that didn't occur to the developers.

You can make a feature request for LISE here: https://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/feature_request/list/1345

Thank you. I going to try a feature request. As a temporary solution, I have removed the validation from the module code for now.

DIGI3 wrote: ↑Wed May 28, 2025 1:46 pm I think it's fair to say you have a relatively edge case that didn't occur to the developers.

I don't mean to offend the developers in any way. But SEO is not insignificant, and especially with such a fine feature as Custom URL, it would be great if you could do just that with it: Customize! Even if the result isn't best practice.

BTW: A similar thing is the "page url" in the content manager. But this should this be an new topic.



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