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WHMCS offers an SEO friendly URLs option in the adminstration panel. The steps to enable them are documented in the official support center article, so check there for how to enable them.

Search Engine Friendly URLs are where a URL which once was “/knowledgebase.php?action=view&id=1″ becomes “/knowledgebase/1/How_do_I_access_my_control_panel.html”. You can enable these for the announcements, downloads and knowledgebase sections of the WHMCS client area.

I recently had to setup WHMCS 5 on a brand new cloud server running a fresh LAMP install on Debian. I had to install curl and ioncube… no problems there. I uploaded WHMCS and configured it with the official instructions and got everything working. In the admin panel, I wanted to enable SEO friendly URLs for the website, so I checked the associated box and hit save. I also renamed the htaccess.txt to .htaccess as instructed. At first everything seemed to work properly, I could navigate to the knowledge base, downloads, and announcement sections.

The Problem

The problem was that after I added some articles to the knowledgebase and tried to go view the article, the SEO URL appeared in my browser’s URL bar, but the page stayed on the main Knowledgebase index with the categories and most viewed articles.

The Solution

I was baffled for a little bit. I double checked my .htaccess file, made sure mod_rewrite was installed and working, but I couldn’t find what was wrong. After some digging around it turned out that the Apache installation that I had on my server was configured with “Options +MultiViews” as default. The solution was to add “Options -MultiViews” to the top of the WHMCS .htaccess file. Everything started working as expected.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 11:05 pm and is filed under WHMCS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.