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Ionic Isapi Rewrite and SEO PRO on Windows IIS

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Contents

Introduction

Elxis is the very popular CMS (Content Management System) that supports SEO-friendly URLs. It is designed for usage with Apache Web Server, and it has no default solution to use with IIS and ISAPI_Rewrite. But of course you can use this CMS with IIS Web Server, and ISAPI_Rewrite will help you to enable SE-friendly URLs. This short article describes how to setup Elxis to use with ISAPI_Rewrite 3. In this article we suppose you already have IIS and ISAPI_Rewrite 3 installed. To write the article we used ISAPI_Rewrite 3.1.0.56 and Elxis 2009.0.

Download and Install Elxis

You can download Elxis CMS from this page: http://www.elxis-downloads.com/com_downloads/elxis-cms/. After downloading please install Elxis according to installation instructions provided by vendor.


Enable SE-friendly URLs

By default SE-friendly URLs are disabled. To enable this feature please go to Elxis administration panel. On the main page of administration panel please select "Global Configuration"

On the opened page you can see few tabs. Please find "SEO" tab and select it:

Now you can see the configuration for SEO. Please select the option "Seo Pro". Then apply and save your settings. Also please go to Elxis installation folder and rename htaccess.txt file to .htaccess.

Now all URLs on your site are SE-friendly. But the navigation will not work properly. It happens because Elxis uses variable $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] which is not supported by IIS.


Patch Elxis CMS

You will need to make a little fix in the Elxis's source code. Please copy this code to clipboard:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL'])) {
    $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL'];
}


Now you need to find index.php file in the root of Elxis Ftp Side folder. Please open this document with any editor (like: PsPad) and paste the above code at the top of index.php as shown on this picture:

Done! Now you can use Elxis CMS with pretty SE-friendly URLs. This article describes how to use Elxis CMS with its default rules in .htaccess file, but of course you may replace them.


Finally we must quote that when we have Windows Server as Hosting and the IIS ( like as usual Apache on Linux Server Area), we must ensure that our site provider give us one more web extension like URL Rewriting. URL Rewriting is a complex subject and involves regular expressions, it allows to setup automatic "virtual" URLs that point to actual URLs on your website - this feature is aimed at advanced web developers. In this example article we use one URL Rewriting ISAPI_Rewrite 3 which is commercial and we find it from our Control Panel Area on Server Hosting (see related image below). The Elxis CMS prefer Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter as Open Source Filter. We have the latest choice.


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