Home page URL changes - can this be stopped?

I’m using YAMS to make a small subsection of my site multilingual. Everywhere else the urls are the standard /myalias, while in the multilingual section only they are /en/anotherpage, /fr/anotherpage etc. This is working very well - apart from the website home page.

With YAMS 1.2.0RC3 enabled, it insists on redirecting any request to http://www.example.net or http://www.example.net/ to http://www.example.net/index (index being the alias for my website’s home page). If I disable the YAMS plugin this unnecessary redirect doesn’t occur.

Is there any way to prevent it from happening? I could understand the redirect being needed on multilingual templates, but not here.

Many thanks for your work on YAMS too, it’s an amazing extension and something I never thought I’d see on top of Evo!

You need: Modules>YAMS>Configuration (was Other Params)>URL Formatting>Site start filename>Don’t include filename.

The default behaviour of MODx when generating aliases/URLs within content is to output the document alias for all documents, including the home page (eg: [tt][~[(site_start)]~][/tt]), unless you just use a placeholder like [tt][(site_url)][/tt]. It will also display the home page whether or not it is accessed with the alias. This leads to a situation where the home page can effectively live at multiple URLs which is not good for SEO.

For SEO friendliness, YAMS will only associate one URL with the home page (or any other page or language variant of that page). The home page can either be chosen to have or not have the alias using the above parameter. The parameter controls whether the alias will be displayed in generated URLs and the URL at which the home page will be available.