#7458 – URL generation for menu item single article.

Hi

With sh404SEF, is it possible to achieve the same for articles linked directly from a menu item?

It's possible but why would you want to do that? That's one of the SEO problems in Joomla that sh404SEF is meant to solve.

Unless your site of course has lots of URLs indexed by search engines and you want to keep existing URLs?

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

I guess we can re-organised the category/article to the structure we want, so that we don't need to worry about how menu may effect the url.

That's the entire point of sh404SEF default URL structure: content URL should not depend on how you navigate to it. Joomla uses the menu structure to build URLs and that's not very good. 

We have some Quix (page builder)  page that is directly linked from menu item, in that case, it seems in the case of Quix pages (articles), the url will follow the menu structure, is that correct?

We do not have any specific support for that extension so the URL will be built using the router.php file that this extension should normally provide to build URLs for Joomla.

My first point about not using menu items to build URLs applies to all Joomla content and a some important Joomla extensions for which we produced a dedicated plugin to build URLs, or the extensions makers produced that plugin themselves.

As you probably don't want to re-structure your content at this point, the likely best way forward is to have sh404SEF mimic Joomla SEF URLs. This is done under the By component tab of sh404SEF configuration. Set any component you want to have that enabled for to:

- 1st column: Use default handler  (that's the default)

- 2nd column: User router.php with menu item

You probably want to do that for Joomla content component and Quix at least.

Then Purge Urls from the SEF URL manager so that old ones are deleted and new ones can be re-created.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

I am a bit confused right now: where are you in your changes? did you re-structure your content yet? did yo purge URLs to get new ones?But let me try to recap/comment:

- the list of issues should have a URL /journals/ijase/articles assuming you changed all the settings we discussed above and purged URLs.

- the "latest articles", I have no idea because it's an "XLayout" menu item and so it's not Joomla content. I do not know what sort of URL this component router.php will produce

What I can see on your screenshot about "Latest articles" is that its alias is "articles". I would think that alias should be "latest-articles". If the alias is "articles" and that component use the menu items to build URLs, then the link will indeed be /journals/ijase/articles

So I need a bit of clarification on where you are now before going any further.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

"List of Issues" is the one that  isn't working, the url generated for the menu item with the current menu/category/article structure is [ http://localhost/journals/ijase/articles  ] 

This is obviously the problem as the URL - which is the only thing that decides of what's displayed - is the one from the other page, "latest-articles"

I see no reason for this as it's a trivial case of Joomla content, a category list. 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.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

So the "List of issues" link is a "Category list" menu item for category #111 ("IJASE List of issues", alias "articles") which itself is a sub-category of category #109 ("International Journal of Applied Science and Engineering", alias "ijase")

The link to that category is therefore /ijase/articles.

Looks like it works as expected.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

That's a more tricky one: the standard way is to manually customize one of them. Click on the URL in the SEF URL manager and change it to what you want.

This work as is in most cases but the trick here is that for categories, this has to be done for the first page but also for any paginated page (ie /journals/ijase/issues/page-2, /journals/ijase/issues/page-3,...)

So if that does not work for you, and you can handle a little bit of manipulating files with FTP, you can add a "filter" to customize the URLs as you see fit:

1. Open the file /libraries/weeblr/sh404sef_functions.php

2. Paste the following code in it (asuming it's empty):

<?php
/**
 * sh404SEF hooks file
 */

ShlHook::add(
	'sh404sef_after_plugin_build',
	function ($string, $vars, $pluginType, $extPluginPath) {
		if (
			'com_content' == wbArrayGet($vars, 'option', '')
			&&
			877 === wbArrayGet($vars, 'Itemid')
		)
		{
			$string = str_replace(
				'journals/ijase/articles',
				'journals/ijase/issues',
				$string
			);
		}

		return $string;
	}
);

3. Delete the URLs involved so that new ones are re-created. 

If you run in any issue, just rename that file to anything else and it will be de-activated.

Any code added here is safe across sh404SEF updates, it won't be overriden or deleted.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr