Drupal Tutorial

How to Optimize Drupal

We are going to explain how you can enable the clean URLs in Drupal just in three steps. We are very pleased to inform you that all Drupal users hosted on our servers will be able to use the clean URLs option, as all TMDHosting servers fully support the Apache mod_rewrite module.

There are only 3 simple steps to follow in order to enable the Search Engine Friendly URLs. For the example, we assume that you have already installed Drupal on your account into the /drupal subfolder (www.yourdomainname.com/drupal) and you want to activate the clean URLs.

There are a number of reasons to do this:

- Your site will look friendlier for the search engines and you will receive better chances to climb up in the search engines rank statistics.

- With the Drupal clean URLs your website will be more secure as it makes harder for the attackers to find sensitive information about the scripts of your web site.

Activating Search Engine Friendly URLs in Drupal

Chapter 1: First, log in the cPanel area for your account. Then, click on the icon File Manager and navigate to the folder where the Drupal CMS is installed. (In our example this would be: /public_html/drupal).

When you are inside the Drupal directory, edit the .htaccess file.

You should delete the entire content of the .htaccess file and insert the following lines into it:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /drupal
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

Please, have in mind that you should replace the path in the following line:

RewriteBase /drupal

with the relative path to the directory where Drupal is installed.

For example, if you install Drupal in your web site root folder and you access it via www.yourdomainname.com, the line should look like this:

RewriteBase /

Chapter 2: Next, log into the administrative back end of your Drupal site and enable the "path" module. This module is very important for the clean URLs in Drupal. When you are logged, click on the link "Administer" on the left menu and then on the link "Modules":

Please, scroll down the page, find the Path module and tick the little check box on the right of the module and just save the settings:

Chapter 3: The final step is to test the clean URLs and confirm the changes. In the administrative back end point your browser to the link Site configuration from the left menu and click on the link Clean URLs.

As soon as you load the page, you will be able to select the Enable radio button and save the changes. Finally, load the front end of your site and point the mouse over a link. You will notice that all links will be in clean (human readable) format in the status bar and in the address bar.