Hi
K2 is indeed a very specific case because K2 comes with a dedicated sh404SEF plugin. So it's in fact K2 itself building SEF URLs, and sh404SEF is just recording them. But 4SEF does not use the same plugin format at all, and so K2 would have to update their sh404SEF plugin to the new format. Not sure that's going to happen more than K2 being available for Joomla 4.
If I want to install 4sef now, to start migrating urls from sh404sef, can I do that? Or is it not compatible with k2?
So moving to 4SEF with K2 in itself would be fine, in that 4SEF will definitely build SEF URLs for K2, however these URLs are not going to be the same as those K2 would have built using its sh404SEF plugin.
The way I'd suggest to handle this as follows:
- Using K2, switch to 4SEF. 4SEF will import all existing SEF URLs from your sh404SEF database, therefore all existing URL, for your existing K2 content, will be preserved. As long as you do not purge URLs in 4SEF, you'll be fine. Even if you do so, you can still import again from the sh404SEF tables, and you'll get your existing sh404SEF/K2 URLs in 4SEF.
At this point, if you create new content in K2, they will get URLs, but not using the same URLs pattern as with sh404SEF. The URLs created will be the exact same as if you only had Joomla SEF URLs. Remember, that's just for new content added after switching to 4SEF.
So aside from having less "sexy" URLs, generally that would be fine.
Now moving to regular Joomla content is something else. I don't know how you plan on doing that exactly. Do you have an automated way? some kind of importer? or just manually creating articles and copy/pasting content from K2 to Joomla?
Also then with 4sef will I be able to manage the redirect from the k2 url to the joomla one?
No, 4SEF can't help. 4SEF does only one single thing: create/manage SEF URLs. It has no other feature than that. Its first and foremost purpose is to allow a transition for sh404SEF URLs from J3 to J4.
4SEO - not 4SEF - is what you need to do all SEO work, including redirects.
Now redirecting from K2 URLs to Joomla URLs may be simple or complicated, it depends on how the content transfer will happen between K2 and Joomla.
The worst case is if you get totally different URLs and have to do one-to-one redirects for each item.
To avoid that, I'd suggest trying:
- build the same category structure in Joomla than in K2: using 4SEF, you may just obtain about the same Joomla articles SEF URLS as the K2 URLs, meaning you'll just have to delete the K2 URLs for the Joomla article one to take over.
- if not possible to have exactlty the same structure, you could put your transferred articles into a specific top category, such as /new/[redacted]
And therefore you could have just one single redirect for all K2 content, or one per category, similar to:
from: /k2-cat-1/{*} // K2 URLs
to: /new/k2-cat-1/{*} // Joomla content URLs with similar name as K2 content
With one rule, or a few, you'll be able to redirect many articles in one go.
Now if you create each joomla article by hand, copying the content, I would then suggest a different approach:
- create the Joomla article
- view it on the frontend, so that 4SEF creates a URL for it
- go to 4SEF admin, locate the corresponding K2 URL, take not of it and delete it
- manually customize th new article URL to be exactly the same as the corresponding K2 URLs for the same content
That last method is the best by far, because the URLs simply won't change between K2 and Joomla articles and you won't need any redirect. If you can, from an SEO standpoint, this is what you want to do.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
