Want to change the name of a document, page, or image? One method is to simply go to that item in the Edit view and change the Title in the title field. That will change the name alright, but there's a problem that can crop up if other things have been linked to that item already.

Plone actually has two names for everything. Title, which you are already familiar with, and something called the Short Name. The Short Name is always in lowercase and uses hyphens instead of spaces between words. The reason for this is that Short Name is used to generate the URL for the item in question. In other words, if you simply change the Title of something, without also changing the Short Name, things can get very confusing.

To change the Short Name, go to the Contents tab of the task bar. Then select an item or several items to rename from the list and push the Rename button.

If you need to rename something, the best practice is to change both the Short Name and the Title to the same thing. As you can see, About Us should be written about-us for the Short Name. The importance of renaming this way becomes very apparent as your site gets bigger and bigger. Links will break, and things will get hard to find if you are not consistent about your naming.

    •     Changing the Short Name causes anything that is linked to that item to stop working.  After modifying a Short Name, it's best to use the search functionality to find any references to that item.  Try searching for the former Short Name.

    •     You can't change a Short Name to anything that already exists in the same folder.  In other words, if there's already a folder called  "about-us", you can't rename something else with the same short name.

That's all for this Quick Start Tutorial! Return to the Tutorials main page, or explore another section of Learn Plone from the home page. Be sure to practice what you've learned here to retain the information.