#5781 – Some questions after installation

Hi

Please absolutely ask one question per ticket. It is not manageable to reply to so many questions in one single ticket. Let's try but I may close this ticket later on.

1 -

I set an appended page title under SEO/Page Title but it's not inserting the separator on the 404 page. It does however add the appended title.

Separator and "Append to title" are 2 different things. Separator is used to separate title parts such as category and item title. So for instance on a 404 there is nothing to separate, the title being only "The page you requested..."
"Append to title" is used raw and simply appended to whatever the title would have been without it.

2 -

Is there a way to exclude menu items from re-writing?

Menu items are not used in rewriting, at least for all Joomla standard content types. We might use them for some components that don't have direct sh404SEF support for instance.

sh404SEF re-writes them to category/article URLs.

sh404SEF always use that for linking to an article (although there are some configuration options to decide whether you want category, categories, alias or title, ids or not, etc). Again, menu items are not used.

3 -

Is there a way to replace the categories in the URL to a specific path for a certain article category automatically?

For example https://xxxx/europe/sweden/halland/6851-kullaberg to https://xxxx/trails/6851-kullaberg

As hinted above, we only characteristics of the item to build a URL. The goal is, contrary to Joomla, that the URL is not dependent on how you navigated to it.
By default, for Joomla content, you will get this URLs structure: /top-cat/level-2-cat/article-title.
Under Extensions -> Joomla in sh404SEF configuration you will find options to configure how many nested categories to use in the path, whether to use IDs or not, etc.
Note that:

- these settings apply globally except for inserting a unique id (for Google News) and adding a date, which are per category
- after modifying such a setting you will need to either delete the affected URLs or Purge all URLs so that new ones are created again according to the new settings.

URLs are not affected by settings changes as long as they are in the database and listed in the URL manager.

Is there a way to extract content from the page and set it as the OpenGraph description?

OGP description and TCards description is automatically built by sh404SEF. We actually build the meta description, which is also used for the OGP and TCards description.
In order of precedence, the description is taken from:

- the one set inside of sh404SEF URL manager or Title and meta manager
- the one set in Joomla (at article level or at menu item level)
- if none set and "Automatic description" is enabled (it is by default), a description is generated from the page content with a multi-step process to try first extract it from the main content (the article main content). If not possible (for some 3rd party component), we then try to scan the full page to build a description.

Note that a similar process happens to determine if possible a representative image for the page and use it in OGP and TCards.

Best regards

Hi,

3 - There is no way to do such thing, short of developing your own custom sh404SEF plugin to build URLs the way you want or using one the sh404SEF filters, which again requires PHP coding to build the URL as you want it.

You might have missed the question regarding the Google structured data. As above, I have an internal category hierarchy and I don't want it to show in the Google breadcrumbs.

We do not actually build the breadcrumb, that'd be redundant with what Joomla is already doing. What we do to build the Structured data record is simply translate the breadcrumb as Joomla is building it into a json-ld format. Not a trivial task though. We currently do not have a filter on that but we can easily add one if you want to build your own implementation.

Best regards