Removing a Section Alias from Evolution CMS URLs

Legacy Evolution CMS projects often hit the same SEO and UX problem: the real document tree is correct for editors, but one or more container aliases make the public URL deeper than it needs to be.

The usual bad choices

• disable nested friendly URLs completely and lose the hierarchy
• flatten the tree in the manager and make editorial work messy

The original article explored a third option: keep the manager structure, but change how the cached routing path is built.

The core idea

Add a per-resource flag that tells the URL builder whether a given document should participate in the final path. In practice that means a container can stay in the tree while disappearing from the public URL.

What the old implementation changed

• a new alias_visible field in site_content
• a checkbox in the manager edit form
• custom logic in the cache-building processor so hidden aliases are skipped

$path = ($this->aliasVisible[$id] == 1)
? $this->aliases[$id] . ($path != '' ? '/' : '') . $path
: $path;

Why this was useful

It gave projects cleaner public URLs without forcing editors to abandon the natural content tree.

Modern caution

This is a legacy core-modification technique, not a recommendation for every current project. If you use it, document the patch carefully and test every routing-dependent extra. But as a historical Evolution CMS pattern, it remains a very practical example of how flexible the cache-based routing layer can be.