With MyBB we want everyone to have the best possible “out of the box experience” as possible. An “out of the box experience” is the experience a user has with MyBB directly after they’ve installed it - after all, first impressions do count.
MyBB 1.4 is becoming more and more intelligent. We recognise what users want, that they want to have a functional system which they enjoy to use and requires little time and effort to configure.
The “Search Engine Friendly URLs” option in MyBB 1.4 is an example of how MyBB is giving you want you want right out of the box. For those who don’t know, search engine friendly URLs convert big long URLs in to much shorter and easier to type URLs. They’re also very beneficial to search engine optimization and improving your page rank. This is a feature users have wanted us to support for a long time and have had to rely on plugins to provide the same functionality however with varying results.
An example of search engine friendly URLs would be as follows:
Old URL: showthread.php?tid=10&page=2
New and Improved URL: thread10-2.html
Now I estimate that a lot of people will turn to us and ask us how they enable this functionality or do we have it in MyBB at all.
MyBB 1.4 will automatically enable search engine friendly URLs if your server supports them. (Apache based servers only at this stage)
This means that after you install MyBB, if your server supports search engine friendly URLs they will automatically be enabled without you being required to perform any additional configuration.
Of course, we support the automatic detection along with manual overrides to enable or disable the functionality for when you wish to override the automatic detection or disable the functionality completely.
Stay tuned for more information on MyBB 1.4 in the coming weeks (pending we feel like releasing some of our much kept secrets)
Comments
k776 (January 8th, 2007, 6:08 pm)
Very nice. I hope I still get to beta test the next version
Dempsey (January 8th, 2007, 7:59 pm)
Very nice
I think this will be a very popular addition to an already great forum system 
Belloman (January 8th, 2007, 10:53 pm)
I must say that it works quite nicely
I have some speculation on what that information may be…
Tikitiki (January 9th, 2007, 4:54 pm)
I like the improved url’s allot
Coolest-Tech (January 14th, 2007, 4:36 am)
One reccomendation. Use the thread name in the URL, like http://community.mybboard.net/mybb-14-is-out-2.html
Anyway, I hope to beta test MyBB 1.4.
Just make sure to use my domain e-mail, I never check my hotmail. :p
Chris Boulton (January 14th, 2007, 8:29 am)
Using the thread title is a bad idea in forums because the subjects of threads change a lot in a forum and you can’t have people visiting the URL only to find it doesn’t work because the subject has been changed.
Also - we need to add lots of queries in if we wish to fetch the subject of the thread.
It’s all fine for the SEO mod because thats a manual hack which filters all URLs at the end of the page and fetches titles that way - but for us it is a lot different.
The most reliable way is to match directly against the ID of the thread.
Belloman (January 17th, 2007, 7:22 am)
And, not only are these URLs Search Engine Friendly, but they’re user friendly too.
pepo (March 15th, 2007, 5:13 pm)
Yes the title in the URL’s it’s bad Idea, what if your forum work on arabic, or chines, or Hebrew letters.??? it’ll return with verry verry bad resutl see?
MyBB Games '07 - The Latest in MyBB News, Sports and Weather... and Games! (May 17th, 2007, 11:25 am)
[…] Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) URLs have been mentioned before, but are still something to get excited about! Search Engines love pages like hello-this-is-a-webpage.html and hate pages like showthread.php?tid=2566&pid=42996, and so MyBB 1.4 will use the former by default. In case your server does not support this kind of URL, MyBB will use the latter. You can learn more at Chris’ blog post. […]
Aglioeolio (August 6th, 2007, 11:36 pm)
Nice feature! Can´t wait to see in action
Could this be improved to titled urls without mod_rewrite later?
For example: actually I use a wordpress friendly url like this
http://blog . pesbrasil . org/index.php/pixies.html
with normal mod_rewrite would be:
http://blog . pesbrasil . org/pixies.html
but then it would be needed to edit ‘.htacess’ file and this was loading my server a lot…
Adam (August 11th, 2007, 5:26 am)
Is there anyway to change thread to just a t with limited modding?
Tikitiki (August 16th, 2007, 12:48 pm)
Yes, I believe so. You will have to change it in the htaccess file and global.php where the seo url is defined.
seolover (November 10th, 2007, 5:09 pm)
i hope the mod replace non english characters with numbers and leave
english chrachters in the url example :
منتدي متخصص في ال seo وال pagerank
i wish it apearr lik this
www.mysite.com/136-seo-pagerank.html
i was use mod its called phpbbseo and it was my links sam above.
best regards
himi (January 30th, 2008, 7:30 pm)
Wow, great to hear that. I can’t wait for the new version of myBB forum, because I desperately need the more engine search engine friendly links!
himi (January 30th, 2008, 7:32 pm)
Uh… I forgot to ask what most probably also other users would like to know…When could the upgrade be avaliable?
Jordan Meeter (April 8th, 2008, 4:59 am)
Awesome, sounds very nice. Can’t wait!