What are nice urls?

Well, take a look at the ez.no site and you will notice that the URL's are formed with a nice descriptive path and without the index.php and /content/view/full/id like in the demo setup.

Why doesn't the demo come with these nice urls?

The demo setup is general for both non-virtual host and virtual host setups. Therefore it always includes the index.php script.

What are the necessary steps to get rid of index.php in the URL?

First of all, you need to have a virtual host based setup with the proper rewrite rules. See the install section for a detailed description.

Then you need to search for instances of the ezurl operator in the templates and change it to ezroot instead. The latter does not include the index.php in the resulting URL. If you create your own templates, just use ezroot for URL assembling.

How to get a nice path representation in the URL?

First you need to change NodeTranslation in [URLTranslator] to enabled in your /settings/override/site.ini.append.php or in the siteaccess override for your /settings/siteaccess/yoursite/site.ini.append:

[URLTranslator]

# Use either enabled or disabled

Translation=enabled

# Enable this if you want to percieve the url as a path element

# for the node tree. By entering the path in the url and ending it

# with a .html you will get the correct node.

NodeTranslation=enabled

The next step is to change your templates to use the url_alias field for the requested node in actions like /content/view/full in the build up of urls (and use the ezroot operator instead of the foul-proof ezurl operator if you did not already do this).

For example change

<a href={concat("/content/view/full/",$Folder:item.node_id,"/")|ezurl}>{$Folder:item.name|wash}</a>

to

<a href={concat("/",$Folder:item.url_alias)|ezroot}>{$Folder:item.name|wash}</a>

As always when changing templates, clear your cache to see the results or turn off caching altogether.

Where to use nice urls?

You can use nice urls with url_alias in all instances where you have a /content/view action. So pagelayout.tpl and the overrides for sections are the place to start. Next you can change the overrides for the full_class_[id] for folder or folder like objects.

Where not to use nice urls?

Better not use the url_alias in actions other than

/content/view/<full|list...>

since you may break some functionality in for example creating new objects (where url_alias does not make sense since the node has no name yet).