#110 – Suggestion: meta data in one place

Hi

1 - Why do you duplicate? You should pick one, depending on your workflow, either enter them in Joomla, or in sh404SEF.

2 - The sh404SEF meta data manager allows selecting URLs with or without title, and with or without description. However, you must use sh404SEF for meta data and title entry if you use that.
Likewise, the URL manager will display the duplicates URL count (and list them in a popup). However with sh404SEF you don't really have duplicates URL any more, as it'll make sure they are hidden and the outside world only see always the same unique URL.

3 - That's something in the roadmap, but at the same time there are some good extensions to do that, with plugins for many extensions. What do you think would be the benefit to have that in sh404SEF, in your opinion?

Rgds

1 - Good
2 - Yes, the integration with Joomla can be better. Unfortunately it's not that easy, because Joomla is not consistent. You can enter meta data for menu items and for articles (or many other types of content - I'm not even talking about other extensions). Now which one should win?
sh404SEF does the right thing (I think :) ), ie everything is attached to a page, a URL. But matching 1 to 1 with Joomla is not that simple, as a the same article may have multiple URLs.
3 - I see, but normally OSMap dev has just started again, so it should improve and there are other extensions as well. Anyway, like I said, it's on the map!
Rgds

2. I see, but I still think a way of finding url's which don't have any metadata set at all would be nice.

Well, if you really mean "By URL", that's what sh404SEF already allow. If you actually mean, "I have to look at each URL, understand that it's a Joomla content URL, or a menu item or a catgeory blog, and check if the corresponding Joomla content item has some meta data or not, it'll take minutes before the corresponding SQL queries can be run.
Of course, that can be organized as a one off thing, like a "Check my pages" button that you run once in a while or otherwise. I have things in store for that in the future!

3. Perhaps it's an idea to make a plugin for OSMap, so that it gets the URL's from sh404sef?

That's exactly why there's no sitemap system in sh404SEF right now. You usually don't want to simply dump all URLs into a sitemap. A sitemap is supposed search engines what your "good" URLs are, and so you want to be sure you only feed them with no duplicates, pages iwth good metas, etc
So you have to be able to process them. Dedicated extensions such as JSitemap pro have (very complex) systems to extract pages from extensions, with dozens of plugins just for that. It can also get very cpu intensiev to generate a sitemap, espcially on large sites (and a sitemap is of nearly no use it you don't have a large site).
I don't want to get into that at all, but I do hope to find a simpler way.

Rgds

Hi

Because when you do that, you're doing it for a single URL. You know what the URL is, you know what article (if an article is required for that page) or menu item we're talking about, so it's just for one article.

If we are searching for URLs with no meta data, then for each and every URL in our database, we have to repeat the process:
- what piece of content is displayed on that page/URL? let's be simple, say it's just a regular joomla article with id = 10
- so we load article with id=10, see if it has some meta data
- if not, we need to review all menu items, see any might be displaying article #10 and has some meta data
- of course check if sh404SEF has some meta data

So in the simple case of an article, we have at least 2 queries, or rather complex JOINs, and need to do that on each URL in the database, which usually is goes into the low thousands.

Rgds