I've now found a gajillion pages on "search engine friendly URL's," and whoah, I'm looking for a simple procedure that will undoubtedly work.

I'm using Joomla! 1.0.13 Stable,

and what I'd like to be able to do is choose my own domain names. Is that possible? The threads I've found are soooo long...

Best,
Dainis

To be sure I'm answering the right question, you want the page to be:  http://www.DomainName.com/aboutMe.html.

The "www.DomainName.com" is what you register and is pretty much independent of joomla.

So the next part is you want to change http://www.DomainName.com/option,com_jd ... 105/p,463/ into the nice (SEF) http://www.DomainName.com/aboutMe.html.

There are a few components that will do this for you.  For various reasons (mostly related to support for specific components/modules), I use SEF Advanced (http://www.sakic.net).  It costs about $50-60.  There are free versions out there too (like sh404SEF - http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/), but I haven't tried out a recent version of that. 

These will change http://www.DomainName.com/option,com_jd ... 463/  into something much nicer like (componentName/categoryName/pageTitle.html).  So that might do it for you right there.

If you want to make your pages URL even shorter, you can do that too with SEF Advanced by creating an alias for the page.  sh404SEF probably has the same functionality.


OK, is it worth shelling out the money rather than using the free version?  What I'd recommend is checking the compoonents/modules you definitely want to use to see which ones have been tested.  I often see extensions refer to supporting various SEF components, but SEF Advanced is almost always on the list. 

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the tip, it looks like things will finally come together with this joomla add-on.

I just tried to install SEF Advanced, and I get this error:

Site error: the file .../administrator/components/com_sef/admin.sef.php requires the ionCube PHP Loader ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so to be installed by the site administrator.

I'll look around to see if I can find a support forum.

Best,
Dainis

SEF Advanced requires Ion cube since he encodes his software.  There should be a link to where you download that software from and then you just put it at the top level directory on your site.

Getting SEF components setup often takes some time to get the kinks worked out, but once it's up, you'll be fine.

jim

Hi,

If you are looking for simplicity, you may want to give sh404SEF a try. On most host, it will install and run without you needing anything additional, not even a .htaccess file (of course you can set .htaccess file if you like).

Regards

If I try sh404SEF, and it doesn't work, will it "break" my site, or will I just be able to backtrack?

Hi,

Just like all (well, most) components, you'll always be able to just uninstall. And there is an on/off switch as well, before you resort to uninstall. Actually, when you'll install, it's going to be off, so you have to Enable it (set Enable param in backend to Yes), as per the instructions shown when installing.

Regards

PS1: you'll need to uninstall SefAdvance first, Joomla only accepts one SEF extension at a time
PS2: if you happen to uninstall sh404SEF, by default it will leave all its data table and configuration files in place. This is to allow transparent upgrade to new version. If you want to fully remove it, you need to set all "Preserve SEF URL", "Preserve Configuration", etc parameters to NO before uninstalling.

OK, I'll likely give sh404SEF a try tomorrow.

If http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/community/ is my joomla root folder, would URL's like:

http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/public-aff ... tools.html

be possible with sh404SEF?

Right now, the page is cut and copied HTML...bad news! I'd like those pages to be real joomla pages.

Best,
Dainis

OK, the sh404SEF look pretty nice, but I sure don't like the pesky extra index.php it puts into the URL. Also, I can't seem to get it to show URL's that are one level above the Joomla root.

My sh404SEF post is here:
http://extensions.siliana.net/Forum/sh4 ... .html#6411

I started foolin' around with htaccess, and I'm not quite there yet.

Here's what I've tried:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^test\.html$ http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/community/ ... ontact-Us/

OK, that works, but the thing is, that I want the display URL to be test.html, not the redirected URL. Is there any way to tell the server to display the browsed url and not the destination url?

RewriteRule ^/community/index\.php/Resources-in-rG-Section/ http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/resources.html

OK, this doesn't work. Or at least it's not giving me what I want. My intention was to have the display URL be /resources.html, and for people to be able to browse that.

Redirect 301 /contact-us.html http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/community/ ... ontact-Us/

OK, this works too, but it's still displaying the wrong URL. It's going to the right URL, but the display URL is wrong. Yes, I want people to be able to browse to /contact-us.html, but then, I don't want the URL to change, I want the Joomla file to be accessed, and I want the user to see http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/contact-us.html

Can ya' help? I've been cruisin' tons of how to's and tutorials, and it just hasn't clicked yet for me.

Best,
Dainis

This issue is still open:

With http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/community/ as my joomla root folder, how are URL's like:

http://www.rglohjahwwans.com/public-aff ... tools.html
and
http://subdomain.rglohjahwwans.com/name-of-choice.html

possible?

Best!
Dainis

Now I've got another thread going to resolve this issue:
http://www.htaccesstools.com/forum/index.php/m/855/?

...any ideas from the pros here?

I'm still trying to figure out a way to choose my own URL's for my joomla site. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--Dainis

To get friendlier URLs (ie SEF - search engine friendly URLs) like xxxx.xom/pageTitle.html use one of the SEF extensions.

Those give SEF url's, but I'm trying to choose my own url. I already have sh404SEF installed. I just can't get it to work the way I would like. It improves the URL's, but I can't get it to allow me to choose the url. I can enter my desired URL, but there are limits to what sh404SEF can do...and I'm not sure how to configure it to choose my own url.

Glad to have some action on this thread though...whoo!

Thanks for replying...might just get to the bottom of this!

Best,
Dainis

I'm not familiar with that extension, but some have a way to define aliases. It should have a separate tab in the the admin component for doing aliases. It might be along with the tab that is for telling it not to create a SEF url (some components won't work if their URL is remapped).

Checking out that component's forum will probably have the answer already there, and if not, it's focused on what you are looking for.

Hi,

Trying to make the sub-folder disappear from the url is not a sh404SEF or Joomla issue. It is only a web server/.htaccess issue. I'd say the htaccesstools.com site should be a good source of information on that.

Regards

http://extensions.siliana.net/en/Forum/ ... ctory.html
http://www.htaccesstools.com/forum/index.php/m/855/?

Those are my threads...thanks for the input...but I'm still stumped and can't find the right information. I've messed around with htaccess quite a bit now, and while I can particular pages to load, I can't figure out how to define what url the visitor sees.

I would think this would be incredibly basic, on the one side would be the display URL, and on the other side there would be the "background" url that the server actually serves when that url is typed in.

Still stumped, and thanks for your replies...
Dainis

OK, I'll

a) try to find it

and

b) try to install and work with it.

Wow...it's taking a long time, but we might be getting somewhere!

Cheers!
Dainis

I turned on use htaccess and now I'm getting better urls for sustainable-bliss.com, because that is installed in the root directory. We'll see if the htaccess option in sh404SEF allows me to choose my own url. If it does, then I'm done. So, it looks like I'm making progress with sh404SEF.

Cheers!
Dainis