SEF urls

Hi Gang,

I'm struggling with some of the urls created by SH404SEF.

I have www.vintageleathersofas.com/Carlton/prod..._pathway-0/Itemid-20 and www.vintageleathersofas.com/Carlton/prod...0/category_pathway-0 which appear to be the same page.

I'm confused as to how this is generated and what the difference is.

The difference in both URLs is the cid parameter.
In the first URL, the id 1083 is the id of the variant Cerato of your product.
In the second URL, the id 1035 is the id of your product.

I suppose that the second one is generated when you're displaying your listing of products while the second one is generated when you're displaying the cart which has a link to the variant selected (when you click on it, you'll see directly the product with the characteristic you set before adding the product to the cart). In that case, both as the same since your default variant is the Cerato one.

Why are you struggling with them ?
It's just normal.
If you're worried about the SEO, you shouldn't. The variants URLs will only be seen by your users and only the main product URL will be seen by the crawlers since they won't add products to the cart (it's not possible for them).

Thanks Nicolas, if the search engines can't seem them it's fine, I was worried about having to create an alias for all of them!

Many thanks

Nicolas, I have noticed that there is no difference between SH404SEF urls and the built in Joomla SEF urls. I was under the impression that hikashop supported SH404sef?

It does. We indeed made the SEFed URLs the same for both SEF systems.

Is there a reason they are so long?
Also, using the xmap component, and then going through the URLs one by one to hand write a custom URL, when you go to some of the products in the normal way they still show the long URL (the SEF URL - not the custom one). Is xmap taking it's information from somewhere else?

The pathway, and cid information is necessary in the URL in order to have all the information on the page of the link. The name is for SEO.
It would eventually be possible to remove the controller and task from the URL and the pathway when empty. Even removing the rest would be possible I think.
You would have to modify the code of the files router.php and/or sef_ext.php in the folder components/com_hikashop for that.

I don't know about xmap.

The xmap plugin I am using is the new version Eliot did recently, which fixed the problem with the sitemap showing all the variants as blank entries.

It's some sort of intermittent issue, as some work fine, others as said earlier are find in xmap, but not when browsing through the store, which seems to indicate xmap isn't consistent with where it is getting it's URLs from.

With the SEF URLs, when you click on a product it displays the cid, but when choosing other variants it doesn't change that cid, likewise the category_pathway remains the same. You said in your post that they are necessary in order to have all the information on the page, but then said they could be removed... I don't want to tinker with sef_ext.php and break something. Could you please confirm?

Could you point out what kind of products are displayed on the site map which aren't on products listings ? That shouldn't be the case...

When you change a variant, the page does NOT refresh, so it's normal that the cid doesn't change.
The category_pathway is needed in the URLs. However, when its value is 0, it can be omitted as the result will be exactly the same. But if you have a value for it and you remove it, the breadcrumb won't be displayed properly.

Sorry I don't think I've made myself clear.

I have changed all of the URLs in the sitemap to custom SEF URLs in SH404sef.

www.vintageleathersofas.com/sitemap-xml

All of these work ok.

So if you click on premium-harvard/premium-harvard-4-str it takes you to the correct page.

However if you navigate the site, and go to www.vintageleathersofas.com/sofas/premium-harvard and THEN click on the 4-str you are taken to www.vintageleathersofas.com/Premium-Harv...8/category_pathway-0 because it hasn't been re-written. Most work ok, some don't, and I just wanted to try and understand why.

As for the category-pathway, under what circumstances would it be 0 and what would it be something else?

The URL www.vintageleathersofas.com/Premium-Harv...8/category_pathway-0 IS SEFed. It's just not customized.
On HikaShop's end, all we do is ask joomla to convert the non SEFed URL and we have some code in the two files I mentioned above in order to tell the system how to SEF them.
The rest is handled by joomla AND/OR sh404SEF. So if the URL is not customized, it's because you didn't customize it or there is a problem in sh404SEF.

The category_pathway is not 0 when you previously clicked on a category name in a listing of categories on the main area and which then displayed the products below that category and then you clicked on a product there.
That tells the system where in the category tree you clicked on the product so that it can display the correct breadcrumb as otherwise, there would be cases where it would be impossible to know the category path which led to the product page. For example, if you have a product attached to the category "science fiction" and to the category "orwell". Then, you have a menu which displays a listing of the categories. First, the classification types categories: "by name", "by genre", "by what you want" and then, when clicking on a category, it display the sub categories and then the products... When you reach the product page of that product, without the category_pathway, you don't know if the user came from Menu->By name->Orwell or from Menu->By genre->science fiction. The category_pathway will contain the id of the category from where you clicked on the product so that the correct breadcrumb can be calculated.

I realise one of my links was the default SEF. What I am asking is if I changed the URL which your xmap plug in uses to a custom one, how come for some products there is still a non SEF URL when navigating through the site, and for most products changing the URL given by xmap means that navigating through the site takes you to the custom URL? It appears to be behaving as though the xmap plugin is picking different URLs up.


I don't have any listings of categories, I display only one category at a time, so if that's all the functionality I will lose then I can drop that too, ta!

It's possible that the plugin displays different URLs... Do you have some examples of URLs which are different from one another when SEF is deactivated because it's hard to talk without any information... ?

Ah, it is in fact the category_pathway.

With SH404sef disabled, from the sitemap I get:
www.vintageleathersofas.com/premium-hock.../category_pathway-23

Navigating by the website I get:
www.vintageleathersofas.com/premium-hock...r/category_pathway-0

Although I don't know why the URLs are different, I can of course just create more custom URLs if necessary, although I am going to have a play at doing a plug in for SH404sef next week.

Indeed, the pathway is different. Then, maybe there is a but in the pathway calculation of the XMAP plugin... We'll have Eliot check that up on Monday (it's his stuff, not mine so I wouldn't know).

You might want to contact sh404SEF before starting your plugin.
I talked to the developer few weeks ago at the JoomlaDay in Lyon (France) and he told me that he had done something for HikaShop. I didn't hear back from him since then but that might just be what you're looking for.

Hi Mrdexter,

We looked at the XMAP plugin and the category pathway was wrong in this kind of situation so we fixed this bug and made a new version.
You can download this version here , it should solve your problem.

Awesome, thanks Eliot

I want my SEF-URLs for the product pages to be " mydomain.com/product-name " and nothing else. It seems that it is possible as mrdexter showed with his example. But what Extension for Joomla (I'm using 1.6) and HikaShop do I need? Can someone please help me with this? :blush:

thanks in advance!

You should already be able to do that with joomla 1.6.
There is a Redirect component that you can use in order to convert urls from the default ones to something you would like.

Hi again!

I don't think that this is what the redirect component is for. This component is for old, invalid URLs to redirect to a current page within Joomla.

I want exactly the same as mrdexter:

Transforming this URL: mydomain.com/mybio/home/product/show/cid...s/category_pathway-0 to something like mydomain.com/mybio/home/product/bio-biomarkers or only mydomain.com/product-name If I have a look at mrdexter's website this works (e.g. www.vintageleathersofas.com/oak-furnitur...igh-sideboard-4-door ) - the URL is /'category name'/'product name'

If this is possible with the redirect component please tell me how, i tried a lot yesterday but didn't get shorter URLs.

best regards