Using - has Page Name Seperators

[Rich Brady]

I'd like to see future releases use a hyphen (-) as the separator in the Page name field please?

I spend a lot of time editing these and my clients rarely remember LOL

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Another vote for this from me, must be a simple change.

[kathynewman]

Yes please me too.

[Mike Hughes]

Needs to be optional as there are still a few of us that use underscores.

Mike

[Rich Brady]

That's a good call. It also shouldn't change a site during an upgrade, or at the very least give an option/warning.

[guccij]

Gets my vote n all

[leehack]

Could be set in network settings what you wanted as the separator character, although using dashes nowadays has no advantages at all from what i've read.

[leehack]

There's been a far more recent article saying the reverse now.

[Rich Brady]

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=76329

Updated July 2009

[Benjamin Dyer]

This is an interesting item, I'll discuss with Bruce our chief SEO nerd.

Whatever we do it needs to reflect the current trends, be a uniformed and applicable to all users.

Bruce is out for two weeks but I'll get him to reply to this item on his return.

[Rich Brady]

Thank you Ben

[leehack]

If this area gets some focus, it'd also be nice to have the dealing of non-permitted URL characters to be better.

At the moment, apostrophes are replaced with an underscore, which is unnecessary, if it's an invalid character for a URL, then replace it with nothing IMO. I'd like to see:

Lee's Special Deals

become

Lees_Special_Deals.html

not

Lee_s_Special_Deals.html

[brucet]

Thanks for all the comments - I'm not sure why Actinic ever used underscores, that secret is probably lost in the mists of time, but dashes definitely seem to be the way to go.

I suppose the question is what to do with existing sites. Obviously existing page names must be left alone, but do you think new pages created in existing sites should use dashes - leading to an inconsistent page name structure - or underscores?

Either way, I will raise a wish list item for this.

[Rich Brady]

I think leaving existing pages as they are would be the way to go and create the new pages with a "-".

Giving the option to change existing pages, globally, could have catastrophic SEO effects if someone doesn't fully appreciate the consequences.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I think the ideal solution would be an option to select any separator the user wants with a default of a 'dash' for all new pages.
The software doesn't need to change any existing page names.

Personally I don't have any problem with mixing old pages with underscores and new pages with dashes. When I redesigned our V7 shop in V9 I kept the old pages as underscores and all new pages are manually edited to use dashes.