Route Filters are a new system in XenForo 1.2 to allow you to change the standard URLs generated by XenForo, including any URLs generated by add-ons.
It's a fairly simple system to show, but it's very powerful with a little thought. Let's look at what you can set with it:
Other than a list of route filters, that's really it for the system. So how about a few examples...
Changing a route prefix
There's an add-on that does this right now, but we can do it simply from here. For example, if you want to change the resources URL to downloads, you'd just enter resources/ in the find box and downloads/ in the replace box.
Instantly, any links to http://xenforo.com/community/resources/ would become http://xenforo.com/community/downloads/. URL canonicalization would still happen, but it'd use the new URLs.
So yes, if you want to change the forums prefix, you can do that.
Note that the find and the replace fields both need to start with a "prefix" (basically, alphanumeric and dash), so you can't simply remove a route prefix. Doing that would break everything.
Changing a more specific URL
If you want to change a specific URL--or any URL that begins with a particular string--you can do that with route filters.
Maybe you have a page with a URL like pages/page-name/ and you'd rather it be page-name/. You can do that by simply entering those in the find and replace boxes respectively.
You can even create different URLs for specific threads if you wanted to, or maybe a different URL for navigating pages in threads--find: threads/{title}/page-{num:digit}, replace: threads/{title}/{num:digit}-duplicate-posts .
While it may require a bit of manual work, you could get pretty creative with your URLs. You could even give your page URLs hierarchy, if that's how you store your pages:
pages/btcc/ -> btcc/
pages/btcc-2013/ -> btcc/2013/
pages/btcc-2013-drivers/ -> btcc/2013/drivers/
pages/btcc-2013-races/ -> btcc/2013/races/
Creating aliases
Up until this point, I haven't mentioned the "incoming URL conversion only" option. I've assumed that it hasn't been checked up until now.
This option lets you allow a URL to work but it doesn't affect what's considered the canonical version. So maybe we want to have releases/114 take us to our 1.1.4 release threads/xenforo-1-1-4-released.47030/ but we want the original URL to be the real URL. We could do that by putting threads/xenforo-1-1-4-released.47030/ in the find box and releases/114 in the replace box. I'm aware this might seem backwards, but the system is written from the perspective of outgoing conversions, so find represents the URL XF is generating; the incoming conversion reverses it. It means that you don't have to swap the values in find/replace if you check/uncheck the incoming only option.
...So go wild!
It's a fairly simple system to show, but it's very powerful with a little thought. Let's look at what you can set with it:
Other than a list of route filters, that's really it for the system. So how about a few examples...
Changing a route prefix
There's an add-on that does this right now, but we can do it simply from here. For example, if you want to change the resources URL to downloads, you'd just enter resources/ in the find box and downloads/ in the replace box.
Instantly, any links to http://xenforo.com/community/resources/ would become http://xenforo.com/community/downloads/. URL canonicalization would still happen, but it'd use the new URLs.
So yes, if you want to change the forums prefix, you can do that.
Note that the find and the replace fields both need to start with a "prefix" (basically, alphanumeric and dash), so you can't simply remove a route prefix. Doing that would break everything.
Changing a more specific URL
If you want to change a specific URL--or any URL that begins with a particular string--you can do that with route filters.
Maybe you have a page with a URL like pages/page-name/ and you'd rather it be page-name/. You can do that by simply entering those in the find and replace boxes respectively.
You can even create different URLs for specific threads if you wanted to, or maybe a different URL for navigating pages in threads--find: threads/{title}/page-{num:digit}, replace: threads/{title}/{num:digit}-duplicate-posts .
While it may require a bit of manual work, you could get pretty creative with your URLs. You could even give your page URLs hierarchy, if that's how you store your pages:
pages/btcc/ -> btcc/
pages/btcc-2013/ -> btcc/2013/
pages/btcc-2013-drivers/ -> btcc/2013/drivers/
pages/btcc-2013-races/ -> btcc/2013/races/
Creating aliases
Up until this point, I haven't mentioned the "incoming URL conversion only" option. I've assumed that it hasn't been checked up until now.
This option lets you allow a URL to work but it doesn't affect what's considered the canonical version. So maybe we want to have releases/114 take us to our 1.1.4 release threads/xenforo-1-1-4-released.47030/ but we want the original URL to be the real URL. We could do that by putting threads/xenforo-1-1-4-released.47030/ in the find box and releases/114 in the replace box. I'm aware this might seem backwards, but the system is written from the perspective of outgoing conversions, so find represents the URL XF is generating; the incoming conversion reverses it. It means that you don't have to swap the values in find/replace if you check/uncheck the incoming only option.
...So go wild!
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