User talk:Alexia E. Smith

Short URL Pages
Alexia, MediaWiki handles routing of paths to pages internally using REQUEST_URI. Including a ?title=$1 inside of a rewrite overrides MediaWiki's internal correct handling of urls. And in the case of webservers with broken query escaping code like Apache can result in titles such as those including pluses and ampersands breaking. But either way it's incorrect when path routing in core is getting more complex and moving towards internal support for 404 handling, routing different types of url patterns, etc...

All the old short url guides were written without a complete knowledge of rewrites and how MediaWiki handles urls. With the same mistakes being repeated over and over. The large collection of guides is also very unfriendly towards users trying to get short urls working. New manual pages with the proper ways to setup short URLs are being written to replace all the old guides, with notes on all the edge cases included. And that knowledge is being put into a tool to generate full short URL configs based on various bits of information. The plan is to build up enough canonical information about short URL configuration for a future version of MediaWiki to have short URL configuration handling built into the installer so everyone can easily have it.

Btw, the Nginx manuals explicitly state not to use if to test for file existence: http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Check_IF_File_Exists Daniel Friesen (Dantman) (talk) 04:14, 4 April 2013 (UTC)