.htaccess, robots.txt, favicon & sitemap.xml

[alexwren]

I would love to see Actinic upload an .htaccess file with some basic config (i.e. redirect non www version of site, enable gzip etc). I appreciate that it won't work on all servers but why not take a leaf from Wordpress and comment it out so it can be easily enabled and use extra comments for instructions.

Taking this one step further it would be totally neat if when a page was removed or renamed a 301 was created (maybe there could be a prompt on delete for which page to redirect to) making sure that there are no dead links ever. And for the real cream, why not add a default 404 page (editable as a standard Actinic page) with a rule already added to the .htaccess file.

Again uploading a robots.txt as part of the upload would be useful even if basic with commented sections.

Finally a sitemap.xml file and default favicon should be fairly easy to output and it could be updated with each upload as required.

I shall pray now...

[brucet]

Thanks for the suggestions Alex.

The XML sitemap is on the wish list for v11. At the very least I plan to allow section pages to be named .xml. That would potentially enable not only the sitemap but also the Best Sellers and New Products lists to be delivered as XML pages straight out of the box. I have already modelled all of those.

We would need to do some careful investigation before messing with .htaccess. I'm not sure how Wordpress works, but I'm guessing it updates it from the server. FTP permissions are not always sufficient for meddling with that file - quite rightly. Plus you don't want to overwrite any settings in an existing copy, or you can mess up elements of the hosting. So I think we would have to write a new script to modify it, and it would have to be done with great care. That one is a bigger and more risky job than it looks at first sight, IMO.

[Darren B]

Thanks for the suggestions Alex.


We would need to do some careful investigation before messing with .htaccess.

I agree, this would not be one of my recommendations, too many complications as i use custom htaccess command to do certain things so having actinic change it might cause more problems. Besides htaccess is a unix/linux file it will not work on windows systems

[leehack]

I concur, actinic should not touch htaccess at all.

[Steve G Griggs]

htaccess

I totally agree, it would be a minefield to have actinic over-writing htaccess. I do like the idea of the xml sitemap though along with the new products etc.
Robots txt and favicons are easy enough to create and ftp to the site, but having this in Actinic would be good.

[alexwren]

Thanks for all your replies.

Sorry I don't think I explained myself well enough about the .htaccess idea. The way that may open source solutions tackle this is that they create a sample .htaccess and then rename it allowing for you to manually choose if you want to use it or not. That way no overwriting can take place. FTP premissions should be totally fine for this file although as I said if it is a manual process it should be safe to use (maybe even make a backup of an old file if it exists).

My reasons for wanting Actinic to control such a file (given permission) is that there is currently no control of www versus non www version of website, no redirects for old/renamed pages (this is really becoming quite a big problem for my clients and something I am spending more and more time solving) and overall no 404 page which is really quite bad...

Also the robots.txt file and favicon should be included by default too.

Thanks for the update on the sitemap.xml this will be greatefully received.

Alex