SEF Advance 2008 Documentation

hi all!

One of my customers requested the following: they have an e-store (Joomla 1.5 + Virtuemart 1.1.4) and want nice and human-friendly URLs.

I have just downloaded a 5-day trial version of SEF Advance 2008 - installed it + the Virtumart plugin; configured to the best of my ability; seems to be working OK.

I have found a posting here that shows how to do a Custom component string replacement. However, it will work site-wide, not per URL.

Having a good set of documentation would be invaluable - but for the life of me I have not found a single page that would deal with Advance 2008. The lean information available only mentions SEF Advance, J1.0 - no word of J1.5. Honestly, 40 euro for a non-documented product is not quite fair: a product (ANY product!) is only as good as the documentation it comes with...

OK, suppose it's "on the way" but currently unavailable. Can you plz answer this query?

Can specific Virtuemart product page URLs be tweaked in SEF Advance 2008?

If not plz state so.
If yes - how?

TIA -

Lev

However, my customer is interested in making custom per-URL changes in certain URLs.

Hello,

If you click on Help button on any page of SEF Advance 2008 admin you will find documentation for that particular page. Have you seen that or you refer to additional documentation?

You can not "tweak" URLs the way you are used to if you used other SEF component. SEF Advance is pure logic component which means it doesn't store URLs anywhere. To change an URL you can define manual alias with the URL of your choice. Refer to Alias section and its Help files for more info on how to do this.

Hi Emir! Thanx for getting back to me so promptly.

Who could have thought that the Help button would actually lead to some real help! Surprise!!!!!!!!!!

OK, that aside - there's still some confusion. If you say that using aliases DOES ALLOW changing the URL generated by the internal logic of the component, it means that it CAN be done. Is that correct? Plz confirm.

In the meantime, my attempt to create an alias failed: the admin would not save. Clicking Save redirects the admin to the front view and displays the page in question - the one I am trying to create the alias for.

I suspect this is a permission error - can you suggest the file that has to be chmod'ed?

TIA -

Lev

Yes, creating alias you can override the internal logic. In that case that particular URL is saved in database and used instead.

That's redirect is strange. It's not permission thing, the URLs are saved in database, not in a file. Do you enter non-SEF URL or SEF URL directly? I suggest you try with the non-SEF one. Disable SEF in global configuration temporarily to find it out.

That's exactly what I did: disabled the SEF and mod-rewrite in the global config, created a table of non-SEF URLs I wanted replaced; re-enable SEF in Global; started working on the aliases. no go.

Can you please show the exact format of the alias? Does it have to contain the .html file extension, or can it be totally arbitrary in syntax?

You leave out file extension.

But if you get a redirect when you save in admin something is wrong. I suggest you send me the admin password on mail to take a look.