Last post 1 hour 53 min ago

Posts last week 82

Average response time last week 34 min

All time posts 68046

All time tickets 10515

All time avg. posts per day 20

Helpdesk is open from Monday through Friday CET

Please create an (free) account to post any question in the support area.

Please check the development versions area. Look at the changelog, maybe your specific problem has been resolved already!

All tickets are private and they cannot be viewed by anyone. We have made public only a few tickets that we found helpful, after removing private information from them.

#1599 – Multilanguage not working when using "Use category alias"

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

This is a public ticket. Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Monday, 04 January 2016 13:34 UTC

Tobias

Hello,

I have multilanguage site with the default joomla 3.4.8 language switcher. The Joomla multilanguage status shows that everything is ok. My languages are DE, NL and US. Everything works as long as I do not enable the sh404SEF configuration "Use category alias". So my link to another article from a custom HTML module is resolved to "https://xxxx/german/impressum" where "german" is my category name. Because I dont like these long category names I have defined an alias named "de". But after enabling the option above my link shows up correctly as "https://xxxx/de/impressum". Now when I click on it there is a 404 error which shows the custom 404 error page....

The cache was purged inbetween. May you please help me?

Regards
Tobias

Monday, 04 January 2016 15:02 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Well, you certainly cannot define an alias that matches the language code that Joomla multilingual system use! I assume you don't insert language code in the default language, so if you create a "fake" "de" category, then this triggers a 404, as you're not supposed to have the /de/ code in default language.

I would suggest you use another "shortcut". Actually, from an SEO standpoint, I would suggest that you rename you category based on its content, not on the language. I don't know what you site is about, but surely you can find a more significant (and SEO useful) word than just the language used?

Rgds

Monday, 04 January 2016 17:37 UTC

Tobias

It is a hotel homepage with booking system. The categories were used to group the article belonging to one language.

I am not really sure what to do with a multilanguage site from the SEO point of view. If I do not use any categories in my link then I have to ensure a different article name for each language used? Is this the way to go?

so on the german page: www.xyz.de/onlinebuchung
and on the english page: www.xyz.de/onlinebooking

Then my category problem is solved as I won't use them in the links visble to the user. Is this a good way for google bots?

Monday, 04 January 2016 18:55 UTC

wb_weeblr

If I do not use any categories in my link then I have to ensure a different article name for each language used?

You absolultey can use categories. Just don't use the language code as a name. A category should mean something, so find a category name that means something related to the topic of your articles.

Not having a categories (just article names) is also very fine, with short and nice URLs.

so on the german page: www.xyz.de/onlinebuchung

and on the english page: www.xyz.de/onlinebooking

I don't understand this. If you have a Joomla multilingual site, then Joomla will take care of adding language code (not categories names) at the beginning of URLs.

By default, the Joomla language filter will insert a language code into all URLs, so you would get something like:
www.xyz.de/de/german-category/article-title-in-german
www.xyz.de/en/english-category/article-title-in-english

The language filter plugin then have a setting to remove the language code for the default language (German in your case) and this is the way I prefer it. You then get:
www.xyz.de/german-category/article-title-in-german
www.xyz.de/en/english-category/article-title-in-english

If you configure sh404SEF to not display categories, then you will get links like:
www.xyz.de/article-title-in-german
www.xyz.de/en/article-title-in-english

So I don't understand why you don't have language codes in your links (not categories, real language code, inserted by the Joomla language filter system plugin)

Rgds

Thursday, 07 January 2016 15:05 UTC

Tobias

Ok now I understand this topic better. It was not clear to me that joomla does this language code handling in the way you told me. As I do not have that much articles I won't use any grouping in categories.
So I did remove this categories in the sh40SEF settings and everything works fine.

Thursday, 07 January 2016 15:43 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Glad to hear you've got it sorted out.

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

And please feel free to post a review on the JED,it helps and we appreciate it!

Rgds

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.