What's in a Web Name?

Individual content items on a Plone web site have discrete web addresses. Plone creates these automatically, based on the Title that you supply.

What's in a Web Name?

The Title of content items, including folders, images, pages, etc., can be anything you want -- you can use any keyboard characters, including blanks. Titles become part of web address for each item you create in Plone. Web addresses, also known as URLs, are what you type in a web browser to go to a specific location in a web site (Or, you would click your way there), such as:

www.mysite.com/about/personnel/sally/bio

OR

www.mysite.com/images/butterflies/skippers/long-tailed-skippers

Web addresses do have restrictions on allowed keyboard characters, and blanks are not allowed. Plone does a good job of keeping web addresses correct by using near-equivalents of the Title that you provide, by converting them to lowercase, and by substituting dashes for spaces and other punctuation.

To illustrate, let's take each of these two web addresses and split them out into their component parts:

www.mysite.com/about/personnel/sally/bio
^
website name
               ^
               a folder named About
                     ^
                     a folder named Personnel
                               ^
                               a folder named Sally
                                     ^
                                     a folder named Bio

In this example, Plone changed each folder title to lowercase, e.g., from Personnel to personnel. You don't have to worry about this. Plone handles the web addressing; you just type in titles however you want.

And, for the second example:

www.mysite.com/images/butterflies/skippers/long-tailed-skippers
^
website name
               ^
               a folder named Images
                      ^
                      a folder named Butterflies
                                  ^
                                  a folder named Skippers
                                           ^
                                           a folder named Long-Tailed Skippers

This example is similar to the first, illustrating how there is a lowercase conversion from the title of each folder to the corresponding part of the web address. Note the case of the folder named Long-tailed Skippers. Plone kept the dash, as that is allowed in both title and part of the web address, but it changed the blank between the words Tailed and Skippers to a dash, in the web address, along with the lowercase conversion.

The web address of a given item is referred to as the short name in Plone. When you use the Rename function, you'll see the short name along with the title.