Good news: we've finally made it -- friendly URLs are now activated for all LMU.edu Web sites. For anyone wondering why this seemingly straightforward issue had so many layers of complexity involved, we'll have to take that conversation offline. Suffice to say that this milestone involved the Web team, Information Technology staff, various departments around campus and even a computer science professor thrown into the mix for good measure. After several software, CMS, server and database upgrades to the Web and various other under-the-hood changes that only the extreme technonerds of us appreciate, the struggle for non-numeric web address randomness is over.
Of course, life would be too easy if that's all that needed to be said. With our Web site in the 1/2 a million range and roughly 60,000 of them dynamically managed by our CMS, there are bound to be issues with any change. For example, with numbered URLs, the character length of the URL was predictably short (even if it meant nothing other than a database number). With friendly URLs, certain sites that are extremely deep (containing numerous generations of children pages), friendly URLs begin to exceed the maximum allowed length of our Web browsers. This has affected an extremely small number of pages on LMU.edu. If you are affected or have observed any other mysterious behavior as a result of recent upgrades, visit http://www.lmu.edu/reportabug to tell us.
In conjunction with a major upgrade of LMU's content management system (CMS), the remaining 20 percent (or so) of university subdomains will be converted to friendly URLs by the end of April. Topping the list are www.LMU.edu and its many subsections, and Bellarmine College (bellarmine.lmu.edu). Also affected will be Von der Ahe Library.