I've made some progress with this now - though i won't spend much more time on it until next week.

I have rewritten the link conversion routine to fit my new style and now it appears all the modules i have installed are working ok.

The only issue at the moment is what to do with the url's in forms. I'm going to need to be doing a bit of testing with that to decide the best way forward.

if i can get it to work i might go for a url like:

http://www.xoops.url/search?query=xoops&action=results

Will keep you posted but so far i'm pretty happy with it!

Regarding the errors with simplified url - i haven't got spaw installed so i'm not sure where that error would be. I will probably install it and do some testing using my hack to see if it can be replicated and fixed.

Having the title in the filename would be nice too but i think that is more of an option at a module or even XOOPS level. If there is a parameter called title with a value, my hack will incorporate it. (i need to do more tests with special characters though)

I've looked at both Suin's Simplified URLs and Reynaldos ShortURL and while i think they are an improvement on the exisiting XOOPS urls i wanted them to look a little different personally.

I know there are arguments about whether these actually affect search engine indexing at all - especially on google which can index most dynamic pages anyway.

For me i wanted the URLs to look nicer visually, so I have been working on adapting Simplified Urls (in turn based on ShortURL) to have them in this format:

http://www.xoops.url/modulename/filename/key1,value1,key2,value2.html

e.g so a forum post might look like this:

http://www.xoops.url/newbb/viewtopic/topic_id,26288,forum,3.html

Instead of:

http://www.xoops.url/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=26288&forum=3

Urls without parameters look like this :

http://www.xoops.url/news/archive/

instead of

http://www.xoops.url/modules/news/archive.php



I have the first part working - on my test site i can type the new url method and it delivers the appropriate page. I just have to implement the conversion of existing links to the new method. This involves a rewrite of the searching process used in Simplified URLs.

When this is completed i will post here again. However I don't have a public test site available so does any one have one i could use for more complete testing?

Thanks

Benny