Updated on June 10th, 2019. Even thought the Clean URLs plugin for Moodle stopped being updated in 2017 and never made it into the official Directory, its legacy lives on. Thanks to Heywood and Issue MDL-28030 which he created, there are a few ways to add “clean” URLs to Courses, resources and specific pages in Moodle, appealing and reasonable to the human eye:
- Moodle already accepts course ID and short name to access them through URL. Read more here
- For deeper customization, add a rewriting rule in the server’s
.htaccessfile. See an example
Original Text
Written on February 16th, 2019
Ever since Moodle has been introduced lot of persons requested to have the clean/semantic URL’s support like other CMS’s Drupal, Joomla etc. Clean URL’s may result in SEO-friendly site, human readable URLs when shared on social media sites, Better context of a page, and even for security and auditing purposes.
Brendan Heywood from NSW, Australia has come up with a new plugin named Clean URLs which is local plugin type for Moodle. The plugin is available at its GitHub page here. For Moodle 2.9 and 3.0 it needs a tweak at the core along with a rewrite rule in your Apache configuration. To our knowledge it has not been tried on Moodle 3.2 or later.
By release of this plugin it has fixed a long pending tracker issue – MDL-28030 and I believe that this will be included in the core Moodle 3.1 when it will be released.
What’s your opinion about clean URL’s in Moodle? How it is going to affect the Moodle sites SEO? Do share with us in the comments below.
More resources
- Add config.php settings to allow plugins to rewrite output moodle_urls (eg clean / semantic urls) — Moodle Tracker Issue MDL-28030
- SEO Pulse
- Clean URLs for Moodle at Brendan Heywood’s GitHub
