MODx URLs flat namespace issues

Suppose we have an existing static web site with URLs of the form:

http;//www.example.com/science/*.html -- science-related pages
http://www.example.com/history/*.html -- history-related pages
http;//www.example.com/politics/*.html -- politics-related pages

The URL of a page tells you at a glance which section of the web site you are in.

Now suppose we migrate this to MODx operating in search-engine-friendly mode.

It appears that MODx has no ability to preserve the subdirectory name in the URLs. If we didn’t want to set up mod_rewrite maps for each subdirectory, we would need to change all the nice old URLs into a flat namespace, something like this;

http;//www.example.com/science-*.html -- science-related pages
http://www.example.com/history-*.html -- history-related pages

Although we can still identify the section from the name of the URL, the old intuitive concept of URLs being inside a directory or folder based on the subject is now missing. And there is something not so friendly about URLs changing, from the point of view of the user.

Am I overlooking something? Is there in fact a feature in MODx that will let it support a hierarchical namespac? I tried setting up aliases and MODx silently stripped out the slashes from the alias names.

While mod_rewrite might let us preserve the old namespace, it seems to be an inelegant way of doing it. If each access to a web page ultimately results in just a database query, shouldn’t MODx’ aliases allow embedded slashes?

You want to use the Use Friendly Alias Paths option and create containers (a.k.a. folders) for each section. The alias of each section will then be used to build a nested url path to the resources.

Initially I was confused about MODx’s ability to handle URL/subdirectories as well. But once you "get it", you never go back

Thank-you. Containers seem to work nicely.

Rahul