Joomla’s Search Engine Friendly URL system has been greatly improved in recent releases, and now works quite nicely (in most cases) out of the box. Some people really do struggle with setting up SEF, so here is a very basic guide to getting it up and running!
1. Determine whether your server is running WINDOWS or LINUX (you can determine this by looking at Tools>System information in the Control Panel. This is VITAL!
LINUX SERVERS:
- Log into your admin control panel and go to Global Configuration
- Navigate to the section with Search Engine Friendly URL’s settings
- Turn on SEF URL’s, and turn on Use mod_rewrite (requires Apache)
- Using an FTP client, find the file in the ROOT OF YOUR JOOMLA DIRECTORY (i.e. if it’s installed in the root of your web server it’ll be found in /public_html/htaccess.txt but if you installed Joomla into a folder named "myjoomlainstallation" it will be in /public_html/myjoomlainstallation/htaccess.txt)
- Rename any existing file called ".htaccess" to ".htaccessold"
- Rename your "htaccess.txt" file to ".htaccess"
- Save your changes in the Admin control panel (you’ll be promted to change the htaccess file as we just did)
- Go to the homepage of your site (e.g. www.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/myjoomlainstallation) and check the links in your site are working OK.
Some potential areas where problems may occur:
- Joomlafish – you will need a specific plugin for this, I would advise using SEF components such as Artio or sh404 with appropriate plugin
- A bug was present in the "dropdown" box style of contact pages whereby if the user sent a message to any contact other than the default, the email would be sent however the user would be redirected to a 404 page. As far as we’re aware this has not yet been resolved
- Cached pages – occasionally you may need to clear the cache (via the Admin control panel, global operations) if a page or link continues to appear or work incorrectly
- Non-standard components, modules and plugins – they should work, but some do have "quirks" – generally best to contact the developers via their support mechanisms.
WINDOWS SERVERS:
- Log into your admin control panel and go to Global Configuration
- Navigate to the section with Search Engine Friendly URL’s settings
- Turn on SEF URL’s, DO NOT USE MOD_REWRITE
- Go to the homepage of your site (e.g. www.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/myjoomlainstallation) and check the links in your site are working OK.
- Note, unless you use a url "prettifier", your URL’s will have /index.php? in them. Our suggestions? Use linux! Drop us a message to find out how much YOU could save!