Clean URLs in Drupal - how do they work?

I've enabled 'clean urls' in my 'absolute beginner' drupal site, but still see urls in the form ?q=node/14

The Drupal help text says... This option makes Drupal emit "clean" URLs (i.e. without ?q= in the URL.)

What am I doing wrong??

Thanks,
RP

 

There is an option in drupal that makes urls SEO friendly. (Just choose it and thats all)

 

That was the point... I chose it and there's no obvious change to URLs!

 

Are you using IIS? I don't know Drupal but I do know that a lot of SEF URLs are implemented for Apache only.

 

Hi Red Paul,

TwistMyArm is right, the standard URL rewriting for Drupal uses the apache mod_rewrite to automagically remove the '?q=' portion of the url.

If you are using apache:
1) Check that the LoadModule and AddModule commands in your httpd.conf file are uncommented.

2) Check that the .htaccess file for your drupal site includes this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on

# Rewrite current-style URLs of the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

HTH

Petey

 

Hi Petey, is that mod rewrite applicable in SMF, too?

 

Thanks Petey, that was the sort of thing I was after! I'll check it out and see if it cures the problem.

 

Afraid I don't know about SMF but this thread might help:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=620328

Petey

 

You can ask your host if configuring Drupal clean URLs is supported. I use Drupal now and I applied the clean urls without any bumps.