X-Cart Friendly Urls Not So Friendly
Sep
18
2009
18
2009
I got a chuckle today when working with X-cart’s friendly urls feature. Apparently the folks at x-cart think a friendly url is just a url without a query string. However they seem to leave out the fact that the store actually has any kind of structure, so all of your urls will be at the first level no matter where they are in the categorization. For instance, if you have a product in Widgets > Super Widgets > Awesome Widget 25, the url will not be /widgets/super-widgets/awesome-widget-25, it will just be /awesome-widget-25. So forget about siloing your content in xcart. I’m apparently too used to MODx and WordPress who got this right, IMO.
3 Comments » 766 views
Posted in: Ecommerce, SEO
Comment by Anna
on 21 Sep 2009 at 1:26 am #
James, in X-Cart you can easily specify widgets/super-widgets/awesome-widget-25 URL address for a product, you just need to type in this value into ‘Clean URL’ field on a product management page in admin section. Actually, you can use slashes in URL values, thus you can specify all required category levels in product URL address. As a result URL address for a widget product will look like
http://www.yourstore.com/store/widgets/super-widgets/awesome-widget-25.html
By the way, more details about this functionality in X-Cart can be found in the .
I hope this information will help.
Comment by James Ehly
on 21 Sep 2009 at 4:05 pm #
It kind of freaks me out when a customer rep responds back so quickly over the interwebs, but that’s the internet. At any rate, I’m glad you corrected me and that it is possible, but still not very friendly for me. I have a store of 2000+ products so entering the full path on each product is not really something I’m going to do. I know I can figure out how to do this programmatically, but what a pain. Friendly urls needs a rewrite in xcart to be friendly for the user.
Comment by Anna
on 22 Sep 2009 at 2:41 am #
>It kind of freaks me out when a customer rep responds back so quickly over the interwebs, but that’s the internet.
>At any rate, I’m glad you corrected me and that it is possible, but still not very friendly for me. I have a store of 2000+ products so entering the full path on each product is not really something I’m going to do. I know I can figure out how to do this programmatically, but what a pain. Friendly urls needs a rewrite in xcart to be friendly for the user.
It is possible to import information from CSV file into the store (category and product data including clean URLs), that really saves time, especially for large amount of products.
Also you are correct, by adjusting the software code URLs structure can be changed. And these changes should not that difficult for programmers.
Anyway, James, your feedback about the software is important, customers’ opinions are always useful.