Taming Tag URLs with UrlRewrite

After installing the Blog for Umbraco 4 package by Tim Geyssens, I noticed that the links generated in the tags menu were simply using query parameters instead of friendly URLs. I would prefer them to look like this: /blog/tag/tagname.aspx.

The good news is that Umbraco already uses UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite to create friendly URLs, so everything we need to get this working is already in place. After brushing up a bit on regular expressions I came up with the following two step solution.

First, I added the following filter to /config/UrlRewriting.config.

<add name="tagfilter"
  virtualUrl="^/blog/tag/(.*).aspx"
  rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
  destinationUrl="/blog.aspx?filterBy=$1"
  ignoreCase="true"
/>

Then I modified BlogTags.xslt to generate the correct URL for each tag.

<a href="{link}/blog/tag/{current()}.aspx"><xsl:value-of select="current()"/> (<xsl:value-of select="@nodesTagged"/>)</a>

There you have it. Now my tag URLs are all search engine friendly and it only took about two minutes!