Help:Configuration tips and tricks

From GRWiktionaryHelp

Beautifying the URL: Enabling the Apache httpd's Rewrite Engine

The URLs generated by the MediaWiki software by default are pretty ugly; they are hard to remember and contain characters that might disturb search engines when indexing your site.

Since we are using the Apache httpd, its built-in Rewrite Engine can help. It is called mod_rewrite and is also available in version 2; it's also called "the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation". It helps us to construct clean URLs.

This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching (description from [1]).

See Rewrite rules