Lately I have been working on a new feature that many users have asked for a long time and Liferay didn't support it (yet).

As most of you know, friendly URLs are very important nowadays for several reasons, although I would say that the two most important ones are:

• SEO: it definitely improves the ranking of a site when the urls of that site are friendly
• Usability: from the user point of view, if we have a nice friendly url we provided to the end user with helpful information. Even sometimes, friendly urls can behave as a breadcrumb, and allows the user to modify them and visit the pages they want just by modifying the url. 

In Liferay 6.1 and previous, site admins could add Pages and update friendly URLs for those pages from the UI. However, those friendly URLs were not localizable. This means that, in sites with more than one language, the friendly URL for the pages was useful only for part of the people (people who understand the language the friendly URLs are written)

From 6.2 and on we allow localized friendly urls, so for a single page, we can have many different friendly urls for different locales. Then, for the homepage we could have /home (english) and /inicio (spanish), so when an user whose language is English hits the frontpage, he will see in the url www.example.com/home and if i'ts a Spanish user he will see www.example.com/inicio

All the links will be generated considering the user language, so the right friendly url will be automatically used for every link. Then, you may be wondering, what will happen if english user copy/paste his URL (www.example.com/home) to his spanish friend? Will the spanish user access the right page? Will he see the content in English? Spanish?

In that case, the user will be automatically redirected to the friendly url in his own language and a non obtrussive message will be displayed for 10 seconds notifying the redirect to the user and allowing him to access the original link.

I Hope you like it. I'm looking forward to hear your feedback.