It's the third time I'm writing on this particular topic (The EncodeNameReplacements element in the web.config). Articles 1 and 2 have had their importance in building SEO-friendly links in Sitecore.
Double Encoding in Urls
Whilst doing some routine administrative tasks in sitecore, I noticed that some links were no longer working. I was pretty sure that those links were working before I did a publish. :( Back to the drawing board.
As outlined in Articles 1 and 2, I was using
<replace mode="on" find=" " replaceWith="-" />
in my web.config. It was working fine when sitecore items were having names like "Camera one" (->url: camera-one.aspx), "Camera one two three" (->url: camera-one-two-three.aspx) etc...
However, if an item name has a character that has already been defined in my EncodeNamesReplacements section, Sitecore throws you back on the Item Not Found page. In my situation, I had renamed the Sitecore Item :"John Doe" to "John-Doe" (lame administrative task...I KNOW) . The effect of this is that when the user clicks on the John-Doe.aspx, he/she is redirected to the default "Item Not Found" sitecore page. A careful look at the url has revealed that Sitecore was trying to request an item with a name of John--Doe and consequently failed.
Solution
or hack (for some people)
If you are using a specific character to get rid of spaces in url, you need to make sure that a cms user will not be able to create an item name having that character in. Easy way to factor this in is to include your character in the InvalidItemNameChars element in the web.config. In my implementation, I've changed that setting to :
<setting name="InvalidItemNameChars" value="\/:?"<>|[]-/>
and that did the trick :)
