Problems with SEF URL's

-- HikaShop version -- : 2.5.0
-- Joomla version -- : 3.4.1

Hi,

Hopefully my last problem with this current project.

I have implemented access to my shop in two ways, one via a manually constructed Joomla menu linking to shop categories, the other by a Hikashop content module in a sidebar as per the screenshot

I want the URL's to products in my shop to exactly reflect the hierarchy of the store as recommended by Google for SEO. I can achieve this exactly for the Joomla menu items, so a product called "Windpower Sketch Paper" in the "Sketch Paper" subcategory of the "Drawing and Illustration" category has the URL (via manually constructed menu) ...

/shop/drawing-and-illustration-paper/sketch-paper/windpower-sketch-paper
Perfect, the url has been constructed using aliases which is what I want!

My problem is with the Content Module, when I turn sef on the link to the same product is ...

shop/windpower-sketch-paper/category_pathway-143
which is completely useless, where has "category_pathway-143" come from?
why can't I see the category heirachy?

Also the link to the Sketch paper category when using the menu is...
shop/drawing-and-illustration-paper/sketch-paper
again, perfect

But from the content module ...
/Shop/category/sketch-paper
not so good.

How can I get rid of the word category in the path from the content module ? It seems I have to have either a category or product reference in the URL, I can get rid of one but not both, why is that?

Finally, I have the menu option of the content module set to "Shop" but that setting doesn't seem to make any difference.

I Have SH404SEF installed but turned off, I am just using Joomla SEF at this stage

How do I resolve this one please?

Thanks,

Ian

Hi Nicolas,

I've tried that but the setting has no effect.

Ian

Hi Nicolas,

I would add that setting the canonical URL for every product I would consider a labour intensive workaround but not a solution.

All I am trying to do is replicate what I did with my old Virtuemart 1 site which you can see here www.artistpapers.co.uk

I have used SH404SEF on that site, but you can see that whether you go via the Shop main menu item or the side bar menu you get the same URL. It just seemed to work.

I can't seem to replicate that with Hikashop whether I use SH404SEF or not.

This is urgent for me now as it's the last problem holding up deployment of the site.

Thanks for your help.

Ian

Hi,

To have the same Urls for both main menu and category listing module, you have to select the categories listing menu in the "menu" option of your categories listing module.

Else as Nicolas said, thanks to the canonical urls you will have the desired behavior, you can use the option to auto fill the canonical url if not existing and then navigate through the product pages from the desired menu (with the correct url) and the canonical urls will be automatically filled.

Hi Xavier,

As per my original post...

I have specified the "Shop" menu in the category listing module but it doesn't generate the same URL's
As I have also already said, setting Hikashop sef to use the canonical URL also has no effect

I've been on this all day going round in circles and I'm stuck.

Ian

Any more thoughts on this?

More info ....

The content module doesn't like nested menus, so if I set the Use Menu option to "Shop" any link from the content module will always go to the shop home page, even if it's a subcategory of shop.

The content module seems to use the page header text rather than the alias text for insertion in the URL

I am actually not seeing canonical URL's generated which may be why the force canonical URL option isn't working.

Ian

Same issue here. Any solution?

crealiagroup, no solution from Hikashop, it seems the content module just doesn't generate ideal SEF URL's

I've worked around it in two ways...

1) I've copied the html generated by the content module (the grey sidebar in my screenshot) edited it to correct the URL's and pasted that into a custom module. Because I'd kept all the classes the custom module looks exactly the same, only issue is it has to be updated manually but that won't happen too often with my shop.

2) I also had some other hikashop generated links that weren't "right" so I've used rewrite rules in .htaccess, in particluar hikashop was generating URL's like shop/category/my_category when I wanted shop/my_category
To get rid of the surplus word category I used this rewrite rule...

RewriteRule shop/category\/(.*)$ /shop/$1 [R=301,L]

It's not ideal but it does the job. Hopefully Nicolas and the team can look at making their SEF a bit more SEF like!

Hope this helps,

Ian

Thanks iedwards for sharing.

Hi Nicolas,

we've checked again the configuration described by you an Xavier without success anyway. What could be wrong?
Our modules show products with urls like: www.mysite.com/shop/my-product-sef-name (here we have associated the menu "shop")

meanwhile the url with the main navigation menu is:

www.mysite.com/shop/categorysef1/sub-cat.../my-product-sef-name (take a look at the entire link)

Something misconfigured?

Hi Nicolas,

Manually setting the canonical URL using the admin interface for every category and product would take forever and be error prone. I will be setting the canonical URL's in time because I want that meta tag there, but it would be far preferable if Hikashop generated sensible SEF URL's in the first place.

Regards,

Ian

Hi Nicolas, thank you for the reply.

There is only one correct way to generate a good SEF URL and that is to use the hierarchy catgory\subcategory\products (see Google's SEF guidlines) and I was unable to make the Hikashop content module do that. For some reason you either have to have the word "product" or "category" in there somewhere and at times I was getting an odd category id at the end of the URL (depending on settings which I forget now). If the settings would let you turn those additional elements off then we would be getting somewhere!

Ian

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks again for the reply.

Yes I can see you can remove "category" or "product" from the URL, but not both. That's the problem.

Not to worry, I've worked round it and got what I wanted but it's cost me a lot of time, I was just hoping you'd take this on board as a reasonable customer requirement for future versions.

Best regards,

Ian

OK but if I manually construct a joomla menu using the category hierarchy joomla gives me a SEF friendly URL (without any extra data) so maybe a different approach would be for the hikashop content module to generate a joomla menu, save having to do it manually?

It would also be useful if there was a "menu" view in the component so that if I wanted to add a "Shop" link on the main Joomla menu I could do it without having to build the whole thing by hand by adding categories.

Sorry to keep going on about this but it's something that worked automatically with my old site but has caused me great difficulty with this one.

Regards,

Ian