Alias & Canonical URLs

Hello,

Since I set right the canonical urls I have that problem: when I create a new product the alias is auto-created in greek (I had that option up before) which is different from the canonical url that is created after the navigation, due to charset. That way the new product displays Error in front-end.
So I change the alias manualy to be 1-1 match with canonical. But that would a problem if I import a csv file.

How can I generate alias in latin chars based on the title? Should I turn Unicode alias on or off? In general, how can I fix that?

Thank you in advance.

Hi,

If you don't provide the alias, the HikaShop generates it from the product name.
If you have the "Unicode alias" setting activated, then all the characters can be used in the alias and the product name will be used "as is".
If you turn off that setting, the HikaShop will use your Joomla language transliteration system (if any) to convert the characters into romanized characters (there is such system for the Russian language for example, but I'm not sure for greek). And if there isn't a transliteration system, it will just use replace all characters outside the latin alphabet by underscores.

Then, when the canonical URL is generated by HikaShop automatically, it will use the alias of the product. So there shouldn't be a problem with the generated URL, regardless of how you set the "Unicode alias" setting. There would be if you were filling the canonical URL before the alias would be set.

Note also that if you import the products, you can also import their alias in the "product_alias" column.

Hello,

I understand now. So it would be better to fill alias with a unique id, like I did with ISBN on books, because there many with the same title.
In that way i will be ok, even in csv files.

Thank you nicolas.

Hi,

Well, if you have the "remove category and product ids in URLs" setting turned off in the HikaShop configuration, like it's the case by default, you can have the same alias in different products without problem as the alias will be prefixed with the id of the product.