DotNetNuke URL's After Menu Change

Question

I am not particularly familiar with DotNetNuke, so please correct me if I am using any wrong terminology.

I have a client who has a bunch of links that are hardcoded in an HTML module. The URL's looks like the following:

http://www.siteurl.org/level1/level2/level3/level4/pageName.aspx

So the URL for the page is basically made from how the menu is constructed. When I change any order in the menu, this breaks the hardcoded links. Is there a way to use something like an ID instead for the URL so no matter what my menu looks like, the page will be resolved properly?

Answer 1

You could use an ID for the pages, linking to

http://www.siteurl.org/default.aspx?tabid=## where ## is the ID for each page.

Now the key will be to find the proper IDs which you could do by looking at the HTML source of the Admin/Pages page.

That being said, the proper thing to do, would be to not MOVE or RENAME pages, this breaks all the old URLS (as you're experiencing) as well as those pages/urls in any search indexes.

A better way, though more work, would be to create a new page at the new PATH (where you move things to) and then redirect the old page to the new page (in the page settings). This requires quite a bit of work, but is the best way currently to handle old URLs, I have a video example of this at http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Video-Library/Viewer/VideoId/213/Renaming-A-Page-In-DotNetNuke-.aspx