Structured URLs on the content management system (CMS) have benefit. Ugly x-numbers become nicely formatted, human readable URLs. However, after setting this in place on the Academic CMS, we’ve noticed a few issues: a difference in anchor tag behavior and long URLs. To handle the first issue, do not use the default anchor link method, but instead, use an internal link with the page’s x-number such as follows:
x12136.xml#myAnchorName
The other we’ve noticed is longer URLs. Since structured URLs are dependant on the file and folder names you desingnate in the file tree, we have a bit more control over this situation. The way to solve this is to shorten folder and file names in the tree. You may still have the longer titles appearing in the pages. This is because the name displayed on the final rendered page is taken from the Title field on the page. Most folks keep the same value for each (the file name appearing in the tree and Title field element from the page), but there is nothing stating you must follow this convention.
