This is a big step forward. Starting with DNN v.7.1, you can say goodbye to ugly URLs and .aspx extensions. Following a suggestion made by yours truly, DNN 7.1 has adopted a “Page URL” field in Page Settings, letting you specify the exact URL the page should use. If you want to experience this update, I recommend you to host with ASPHostPortal.com. They really expert in DotNetNuke field.

Back to the topic, this is essentially an URL rewrite for the page, that makes the page’s URL independent of the page’s name, meaning that you can change the name as many times as you like, without affecting any links that are present in text/html modules or elsewhere.

The only bad thing (or good, depending on your point of view) is that the URL is not automatically synthesized based on page hierarhcy, meaning that you have to specify the exact URL for each page, starting from the virtual root.

For example, in the default DNN installation you have the About Us page which has a URL of “/About-Us” while the sub-page Style Guide has a URL of “/About-Us/StyleGuide”. The whole URL for the Style Guide page has to be typed again, i.e. the “/About-Us” part is not inherited from the URL field of the parent page.

This makes things a bit more difficult since you have to remember the URLs of parent pages if you want to represent the hierarchy using friendly URLs, but on the other hand gives you a bit of freedom since you do not need to specify exact paths to get to a page – you can easily give the Style Guide page, for example, a URL of “/YourStyleGuide”, forgetting the “About-Us” part at all.

It would be nice to see an “inherit” option in future versions though.