Hi
Again, what do you call a "legitimate" URL? where did you get this URL from? The hidden menu item? That's not how URL are built with sh404SEF, the menu item is never used (with default settings). The likely legitimate URL for that article would be: /article-category/article-title.
As is common, there are several issues here working together to create confusion:
1 - You assumed the legitimate URL from the hidden menu item but that does not happen with sh404SEF. The URL is based on categorie(s) and title
2 - If that article is only linked from a hidden menu item, it means that link is never displayed and the URL is never created: you will always get a 404 for the legitimate URL because sh404SEF never had a chance to create that SEF URL (that happens when Joomla wants to display the link)
The only legitimate URLs are those you can see in sh404SEF URL manager. If a URL is not in the SEF URL manager then it
is a 404 (with sh404SEF default settings).
3 - When a 404 happens on your site, the visitor is redirected to the home - which is pretty bad. This happens most likely because you have enabled back the Joomla router which does that sort of things. You should check that:
- "301 redirect from Joomla SEF to sh404SEF" is
disabled under the "Advanced" tab of sh404SEF configuration
- All components are set to "Use default handler" under the "By component" tab of sh404SEF
Those are the default settings and should stay that way. The redirect to home can also be done by other extensions than sh404SEF but that's less likely.
I use the Joomla hidden menu and point it to the Joomla article to get my SEF URLs. Any thoughts at what I'm doing wrong?
As you gathered at this point, that's not how you get the URL for an article. Menu item is not used to build the URL.
Before I suggest how to handle this, I'd have one question:
- if you do not want that article to be linked from somewhere on the site, how are your visitors going to reach it? In other words, why are you using a hidden menu instead of a regular menu or a category blog or similar?
Best regards