What is the relation between Friendly URL and Managed Navigation?

Question

I have created a new site collection of type Enterprise wiki. And I cannot understand the following default navigation setting:

I mean why I need to use managed navigation to get friendly URLS ? Why can I not use for example structural navigation and still get friendly URLS for my wiki pages?

Can anyone advice, what is the idea of this? I mean managed navigation is different than having friendly URLS, but seems in SP to get friendly URL I need to use managed navigation. I cannot understand the dependency here.

Second question let say I define “Global Navigation” to have Managed Navigation, while Current Navigation uses “Structural Navigation”, in this case I can get friendly url with structural navigation is this correct?

Answer 1

Structural navigation is tightly coupled with the content and therefore it is hard to create friendly URLs. However, managed metadata navigation addresses this issue by providing central way to manage navigation, irrespective of location of content, which makes it easy to create friendly URLs. The only con, navigation will be managed by term store.

You can always create friendly URLs for existing pages (physical), but it is important that you comprehensively define the term sets/terms hierarchy first. Once all terms are in place, you can simply assign the friendly URLs to all physical pages.

Answer 2

If you have a page, "page1.aspx" in the pages library, it can be accessed via:

http://site/pages/page1.aspx.

But, perhaps you would rather be able to access it via:

http://site/page1

The above would require some sort of routing table. This routing table could have been implemented in a variety of ways, but they happened to decide to use a term set for this. So, that's the simple answer to the question: managed navigation means to use a term set, structural navigation says to use the actual page paths for navigation.

While functional, I agree that using a term set to store a routing table adds a good deal of unnecessary complexity.

Edit: so, if you enable this feature after a bunch of pages have been created, to add friendly urls to the existing pages:

1. go to site settings and open the term store management screen
2. find the site collection --> site navigation term set
3. add friendly terms as desired (click the drop down under site navigation or on an existing item to add a subterm, and select "create term")
4. note that if you switch to the navigation tab for a new term, it will have two options checked "show in global nav" and "show in current nav". Also, it will be marked as a "term-driven page with friendly url", not "simple link". (you shouldn't have to change anything here)
5. Navigate to the page
6. on the page tab of the ribbon, click on "Page URLs"
7. the Page URLs screen should show the physical address (http://site/pages/page1.aspx), and the associated URLs, which should just have a link that says " add a friendly url to this page". click that link, and specify the term you just created.
8. Test it, when you click on the nav to get to this page, it should now have the friendly url in the address bar of the browser.