Permalinks not working

The only place that I can find to set Permalinks is by going to the first Backlight breadcrumb - the Dashboard page, and under Recent Albums choosing the name of the album in the list and in Edit Album going to Features. This is not the same menu that is in Album Templates which is confusing to me.

However, setting a permalink there has no effect, no matter what name I put in it. Is this because the Album was created in LR?

Charles

Are you referring to the album and album set permalinks you can create?
Those are set in Backlight Publisher. Edit the album or the set and look under the Features Tab

Yes, that’s what I’m referring to. They don’t do anything when I turn on Permalinks and enter something in the Permalink field. I’m wondering if it’s because the folder name is set in the LR Publisher.

what happens when you go to yoursite.com/name-of-permalink?

you should go directly to the album you made the permalink for.
when that happens, you’ll see the full path to the album in the URL address window, not “yoursite.com/name-of-permalink”
the permalink redirects to the album, it doesn’t change the actual url to the album

What happens is that it works in reverse. I have Enable Permalink set to “on” and when I put “name-of-permalink” in the Permalink field and Save it when I go to this URL:

yoursite.com/name-of-permalink

it actually redirects me to the real link which is:

yoursite.com/name-of-album-set/name-of-album

name-of-album-set is set in the LR Publisher. I’m using the Pangolin Journal for Album Set and Pangolin Album for the Album Template.

That’s how permalinks work in Backlight. They operate as redirects to the actual album. If the underlying URL changes (for example by changing the slug or an album) then the permalink will redirect to the updated URL.

That doesn’t make sense. Why would you have a Permalink that defaults back to the original link? They are supposed to be used so you can shorten the link, not default from anywhere to the long link that is already there.

See this post where Matt gave me the link to the tutorial that explains how to use them to abbreviate a link:

Matt said, “Right, albums need to be inside of a set. However, you can create a permalink alias for the album. Watch this:”

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The words “permalink alias” are key to understanding the purpose of the feature. Emphasis on “alias”. The feature does not change the URL structure of your website, but does allow you to share abbreviated URLs to albums on your site. Even in my video, you can see that when I paste my shortened alias into the address bar to visit the album, I am redirected to the page at the longer address.

OK got it Matt. It would be great if you could make a redirect that worked the other way though.

Thanks
Charles

Unlikely. Backlight’s pathing is already complicated enough as is, which is how we give you pretty URLs in the first place, instead of links full of query parameters.