SEF Advance with Virtuemart

I am running SEF Advance version 2.2.3 on a Joomla site version 1.5.15 together with Virtuemart version 1.1.4.

Overall things are going quite well after lots of configuration, but there are few problems that I would appreciate your help with.

The site is up online here at http://www.mrskibbles.co.uk/


PROBLEM 1 = The Home page of the website is set to Virtuemart’s Home page. When you open a new web browser and simply type in the URL of the site, instead of being taken to:
www.mrskibbles.co.uk/
you are instead taken to:
www.mrskibbles.co.uk/index.php?option=co...=2&vmcchk=1&Itemid=2

Note that when you then click on the "Home" link in the top left hand corner of the site, the URL cleans itself up back to www.mrskibbles.co.uk/ .

What can be done to fix this messy Home page URL?


PROBLEM 2 = If you travel the site by clicking links then the URLs are good and clean.

For example click on “Retro and Nostalgic” in the left hand menu, and then ABC letters in the main donut. Everything is fine showing up as www.mrskibbles.co.uk/virtuemart/sweet-ca...stalgic/abc-letters/ .

But if you then copy and paste this url into a new browser, you are taken to the standard Virtuemart URL here www.mrskibbles.co.uk/index.php?option=co...56&vmcchk=1&Itemid=2

You are not redirected to the clean URL above. How can this be fixed so that you are always redirected to the clean URL?


PROBLEM 3 = In the search box top middle of the site, search “ABC”. You are taken to a search results page.

Now click on the ABC Letters in the main donut. You are correctly taken to the ABC Letters product page but the url is again messy:
www.mrskibbles.co.uk/index.php?option=co...56&vmcchk=1&Itemid=2

Why is this? Can anything be done in SEF Advance to help this?

(note that the same product flypage is used in multiple categories, where I am using the SEF Advance Alias & Meta section to clean things up. But this does not seem to correct any of the above problems)

Thanks in advance for your help - awaiting your comments with great interest.

John

Hello,

PROBLEM 1: It is Virtuemart that's doing this redirect. It is setting a cookie on first time visit. So I think it has nothing to do with SEF Advance. You can verify by disabling SEF Advance and check again.

PROBLEM 2: There is an option in SEF Advance "Redirect non-SEF URLs to SEF". If you set it to Yes it should redirect to clean URLs. However, note that this can cause problems for checkout in VM so if you experience that deactivate it.

PROBLEM 3: It is again up to Virtuemart. It is not using the SEF function on the search page. So turn to its developer to fix that in their code.

Thanks for the reply Saka. To provide you with further feedback:

PROBLEM 1: When I disable SEF Advance, open a new browser, and type in www.mrskibbles.co.uk/ the problem believe it or not actually fixes itself - I get a clean URL for the home page (of course the categories and product pages get messy). Then when I turn SEF Advance back on the problem re-appears (but the categories and products become clean again). I agree with your cookie on first time visit comment because if I first go to www.mrskibbles.co.uk/ (where the url is messy), then I go to another website in the same browser, and then type in again www.mrskibbles.co.uk/ , the second time round the url is perfect. Any further ideas on how SEF Advance could be conflicting with something. Do remember that the Home page is set to Virtuemart which may be something to do with it?

PROBLEM 2: I already have “Redirect non-SEF URLs to SEF” turned on. Please don’t worry about this problem at the moment though. I was only interested in your comments on it. This problem won’t affect search engine optimization for me because the bots will of course travel along the links. My PROBLEM 1 above is far more important to get solved.

PROBLEM 3: I thought this might be the case.

Yeah, I remember VM sets up a cookie on the first visit and redirects to that URL automatically. If you send me the admin password and FTP info I will check if there is some workaround for you.

Thanks again for your prompt reply Saka. Your support is excellent.

Rather than bothering you on this any further, I will first take your advice and try to find a workaround with a friend of mine who is far more advanced than me at coding, so that we know exactly what to do in future on this.

If we are successful I will post my findings on this post as a reference point for you and others.

If we are not successful, then I will ask if you would be able to take a look.

I will post again Thursday next week with my findings. Thanks.

Sorry for posting results a few days later than planned,

After looking into the problem of Virtuemart setting a cookie on first visit which redirects automatically to a messy URL (as discussed above), we could only find the following work around.

We have hacked the Virtuemart code and removed the actual cookie check here - public_html / administrator / components / com_virtuemart / classes / ps_session.php – We have commented out line 100 which removes cookie checking from the site.

This of course means that if a user visits the site with cookies disabled on their computer, the site will not tell them to enable cookies – and as a result the cart will not hold products that have been added.

Please note that the aim of this website is to rank well on Google for specific search terms because it is an online shop, so clean urls take preference over the minimal number of users who would have cookies disabled.

It should also be noted that most of the users who understand to - and decide to - disable their cookies possess the knowledge to enable them when experiencing cookie related problems on sites.


A comment below for Saka

Would you be willing to have a look at standard versions of Virtuemart and SEF Advance to see if there is a work around for this problem – and post your results here? I believe that this may come up in the future for several SEF Advance users, so it would be a great reference. And I will certainly add your functionality if you do find a work around that is indeed better than our hack.

Also Saka, I have found two other bugs (one of which is very important) when using SEF Advance with Virtuemart, but I will post them separately to this problem to try and keep your forum organised. See you over there.

Thanks,

John