changing .cfm to .html?

[oilman]

I have a client that has a site done in Cold Fusion. All the pages end in .cfm. I recall at one point hearing it was fairly easy to have Cold Fusion rename to .html extension. Anybody know how this is done?

[seth_wilde]

I know it can be done (I just don't know how to do it :) )

If you don't get an answer from anybody here it might be worth posting your question at allaire's coldfusion support forum [forums.allaire.com]

[Robert Charlton]

I'm perhaps about to work on a site which also has .cfm pages. I've noted there are no question marks, etc, in the urls, and wonder whether the engines will index the cfm pages without changing the extension.

[jeremy goodrich]

super simple :)

get hold of the IIS web server...

map the executable for .htm to the executable for .cfm in the web server. Now, change the names of all the cold fusion pages to .htm. Presto! All done.

For more detailed instructions, hmmm. I'll have to dig through some notes (or start doing a site search, I think Xoc might have posted along these lines once.)

[Marcia]

>change the names of all the cold fusion pages to .htm

Jeremy, how is that done?

[jeremy goodrich]

rename the files. instead of ".cfm" name them ".htm" after you mapped the server executable to the executable for cold fusion, instead of html...btw, it's been over a year since I've done this, but I used to do it a lot, in the past...been working more with *nix these days. :)

[mburgess]

Hey guys...just to add my two cents...I'll starting to work on a cf site too...is there any need anymore to switch your cf site to html seeing as engines index these pages? Does anyone have any bad experiences with getting cf sites index within the major engines?

[seth_wilde]

I haven't had any problems with .cfm's being indexed and ranking well (as long as there's no ? marks)

[EliteWeb]

I had some problems and I am still recovering from changing the extension names. I had to move from a WinNT server to unix and switchover to PHP because I did not want to load the free cold fusion server on the unix box.

Anyways the security site dropped out of the engines all together, receprical links went to .cfm pages still. Search engines just dropped the site all together for right now. Slowly I am picking back up but not fast enough.

But changing the actual CFM code over to plain html or whatnot just takes some time making sure no CFM code is left in there. I had no problems with getting TOP ranking while I had the pages as .cfm just to let you guys know.

[oilman]

ok - now I know that IIS can be set to parse html as if they were cfm files. I was told that this can be done on a per domain basis as well as a total server basis. The host I'm working with won't turn it on for the server I they apparently don't know how to do it per domain. Can any of you supply me a step by step of how to do this?

[mburgess]

Thanks for your insite...I think that they'll leave the site in cfm and try to workaround the "?" in their urls to a "/." That seems to be the best bet if they don't want to creat regular html pages within their site.

[techiejp]

This is a piece of cake on IIS:

1) Open up the Internet Service Manager.

2) Either edit the master properties, or the properties for a individual website.

3) Go to the home directory tab, clicks the "Mappings" button.

4) Click on the .html extension. Change the Executable path to "<CFUSION ROOT DIR>\bin\lscf.dll". For example, C:\CFUSION\BIN\Iscf.dll. Doublecheck that "Script Engine" is also checked.

5) Hit ok all the way out of properties, bounce IIS (start/stop) for good measure, and you're done.

The advantage besides SEO for having .html is it's transparent what scripting language you're using. This makes it a little harder for the hackers who knows exploits on particular server-side scripting languages.