• Home
  • Get help
  • Ask a question
Last post 8 hours 44 min ago
Posts last week 110
Average response time last week 29 min
All time posts 67424
All time tickets 10424
All time avg. posts per day 21

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.

#6908 – Removing title apostrophes from automatic URLs

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.
Tuesday, 04 February 2020 21:08 UTC
panda9
 Is there a way to remove apostrophes from titles when building the URL?

Currently:
Carl's Dog ---> carl-s-dog

Preferred:
Carl's Dog ---> carls-dog

I've tried editing the strip and replacement fields, but can't get it to work.

Thanks.
 
Wednesday, 05 February 2020 09:51 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

Article aliases are normally stripped by Joomla of these characters, so there's normally nothing to do



Maybe you have disabled using article title Alias (in Extensions -> Joomla) ?



Or this is not a Joomla article? if so, you should:

- add the ' character to the Strip characters list under Main tab:

- Delete the problematic URL and all its duplicates
- Visit your site home page so that the link is created again with the new settings

If you only changed the Strip characters but did not delete the URLS, then the old ones stayed in the database and the new setting is only taken into account for new URLs being created after the change.

Best regards

 
Wednesday, 05 February 2020 18:54 UTC
panda9
All these things were set properly. All my sites use the Title Alias, and the apostrophe appears to already be on the default list of strip characters.

This behavior has happened on all my Joomla sites for years, and I never bothered to ask about it before. When I was doing the postings of articles myself, I would generally remember to remove the extra hyphen from aliases, but some of my clients do their own postings, so the apostrophe --> hyphen substitution is automatically occurring, instead of deletion of the hyphen.

I'm testing this by creating an unpublished article on the back end, adding/removing apostrophes from the Title, deleting the alias each time, and saving. The newly generated aliases all have hyphens where I put apostrophes.

Any other ideas?
 
Thursday, 06 February 2020 08:50 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

I'm testing this by creating an unpublished article on the back end, adding/removing apostrophes from the Title, deleting the alias each time, and saving. The newly generated aliases all have hyphens where I put apostrophes.
I have tested this before replying to you yesterday and it works perfectly fine, apostrophe are removed when using Title.

When using Title alias, then it's even weirder of course because the alias is untouched by sh404SEF, it's built by Joomla and I'm sure you've checked that the alias does not have apostrophe in them (if they do, then it's a Joomla issue).

If you confirm the above, I'll need to look at that. Could you please provide us with superadmin credentials to your website. You can create a temporary account, and delete it afterward, but it must have superuser level.
Also please specify the title of an article that show this behavior.

Thanks and regards
 
Thursday, 06 February 2020 09:13 UTC
panda9
This is a development site, so it is not being used by the public.

https://xxxx.org/
Here's the back end URL: https://xxxx.org/administrator/index.php?hyenalaugh
User: xxxx
Password: xxxx

I have created a test article (the most recent one) that I use to see if apostrophes are removed when auto-generated. I simply delete the existing alias and save to see what the result is.

You can create a new article if you want to run tests as this is a development site.

Thanks.

 
Thursday, 06 February 2020 11:39 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

I simply delete the existing alias and save to see what the result is.

OK, I get it now, there's a confusion. LIke I mentioned above, the alias is done by Joomla, sh404SEF has no bearing on it. If you indeed use "Title Alias", then you'll always get that but simply because the alias is made by Joomla and that's just how they handle it.

To change that, you need to switch Title alias to No. Instead of using the alias as built by Joomla, sh404SEF will then build its own alias, starting with the title. That's when the "Strip characters" and "Replacement list" kick in (actually they always kick in - but when using joomla alias, the apostrophe has been removed by Joomla before it gets to sh404SEF).

I tested that with that article:

- added a menu to it on the main menu
- change config to NOT use TItle alias
- added apostrophe to the list of "Strip characters" (it's not there by default)
- deleted previous URL from the SEF URL manager
- reloaded home page

URL is now https://xxxx.org/apostrophes-test

Best regards
 
Thursday, 06 February 2020 17:14 UTC
panda9
So instead of your original recommendation to have Use Title Alias set to "yes" it should be set to "no."

I now understand this a lot better now and can make informed decisions. I wish Joomla had a way to configure how it converts titles to aliases, but that's outside of our control.

Thank you for your help.
 
Thursday, 06 February 2020 17:25 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

So instead of your original recommendation to have Use Title Alias set to "yes" it should be set to "no."
Yes. I was confused as I thought you were NOT using the joomla aliases - upon which we indeed have no control.

So you need to let sh404SEF build its own aliases to be able to strip the apostrophes as you see fit.

Glad it's sorted out now!

Best regards
 
Friday, 21 February 2020 05:34 UTC
system
This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.
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.