Working with Trial - General Question

I did a search to see if this was answered already, but couldn't find it.. but then again it's late, so forgive me if I'm asking something that's already been covered.

I'm trying the SEF Advance because it came HIGHLY recommended by Alejandro (Jreviews).

So far, so good.. except I'm noticing that I'm having some issues with characters that are showing up encoded.  I read the readme and I read a good part of the docs... I tried as the instructions asked, but haven't gotten far.

my categories have forward slashes "/" in them.  They're showing up with SEF Advance as %10 or whatever...  I tried to get that character excluded from encoding but it didn't work .. or maybe I was doing it wrong...    but then I started wondering.. having the forward slashes in there... will that perhaps confuse things in the URL making the server think that I'm trying to get in to directories that perhaps don't exist?

The other one I'm having trouble with is the pipe "|" which is in some of my URLs.  My assumption is that since the pipe is what is used as an exception for the encoded characters, trying to make an exception of the pipe itself might not be allowed.

I can get rid of the pipe in the URLs.. that's a pretty easy thing as it's not widely used.  Getting rid of the forward slashes however will be difficult as they are heavily used in the categories (the site is a music-review magazine with categories split up by musical genre ie: Pop/Rock/Alternative).

I had thought that maybe I can just have SEF Advance change the "/" to "-" or something using the replace feature.. but would that mess up the URL when it comes to real separators for directories?

So far that's the only problem I've found.. the component looks like it's going to be a GREAT addition!

Hi,

You are right, a slash can't be excluded from url encode since having slash in URL would be considered a new directory. So it wll have to stay encoded or you can skip it completely by using short URLs and aliases. The same applies to pipe.

Thank you for the answer to that one..

My next question, maybe my last   is this:

I understand that there's a Joomla core SEF patch that is available via a 3rd party.  This patch comes highly recommended for use with the core SEF, but I'm wondering if I would benefit from applying this patch to use with your component or whether it is ignored.  I'm just about finished testing SEF Advance, but if there's a benefit to using it with the core SEF patch, I want to test that too first before I buy your component and then apply it to my production site.

Do you mean SEF patch by Joomlatwork? It can give some more options in using custom metadata, custom titles etc. and you can safely use it, if you want, without conflicts.

SEF Advance has also its own custom metadata and titles settings on alias entry.

Ok yes that is what I was talking about.. the SEF patch from Joomlatwork.

It sounds like this patch is not really necessary as the functionality is provided with SEF Advance... so if that's the case I guess I will not worry about adding it to the site.  One less code snippet to worry about

Another general question:

My site is pretty heavily indexed by Google and ranks well.. I want to improve the rank, but I certainly don't want to break things in the process.

Do I need to resubmit the site to Google when I activate SEF Advance, or should I just let the spiders go in and crawl naturally?

I made some pretty major changes to the site (and SEO-related functions) in the last few weeks and resubmitted my site map.  I don't want to get myself in trouble by submitting too often.