|
One of the greatest Joomla extensions I've come to rely on for my Joomla sites is the awesome sh404SEF Joomla component from siliana.com, which allows you to manipulate your standard Joomla URLs into more human readable/search engine friendly type URLs.
For the very best Joomla! SEO advice and information in town check out the Alledia SEO club.
One of my favourite features of sh404SEF is how it allows you to easily recreate/rewrite your urls into anything you choose, if you aren't satisfied with the default SEF urls that are generated.
Occasionally when purging the sh404SEF URLs database for rebuilding the cache, I've noticed that some of my static content page links have been dropped and just result in 404 error page not found messages.
Well it's not actually a component problem at all.
The content pages have become 404's because I have a couple of hardcoded links built into this template up top, which are not linked to any of Joomla's menus and are not dynamically generated by Joomla.
But wait, just what exactly is a 404 error page you may ask ?
Those hardcoded page links in my template are therefore invisible to sh4040SEF because I'm not using the Joomla generated URLs but I have hardcoded the SEF versions which cannot be re-created from the database, they need a little kickstart to make it back into the sh404SEF URL cache.
Now although sh404SEF has a feature to edit and correct any 404 error page urls, I've found that simply using the original "non sef" Joomla url with the static content's ID and reloading the page will bring my beautiful SEF urls back to life.
If all that was too much of a mouthful, let me say it another way.
If you are using a Joomla template which has "hardcoded" menu links, these are links that are built into the template itself pointing to pages on your site [ which many cheap half assed templates for example do have and you should probably avoid using them :D ] and you are using a SEF component, you may run into a similar problem that the links start pointing to 404 pages after you do a little maintennance like purging the URL cache.
To fix this lttle problem and get sh404SEF to pick the url's back up, just find that particular pages content ID [ from the "Static Page Manager" or "All Content Items"] which is giving you 404 pages and add it to a link like this = yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13 .
So just load the page, watch sh404SEF magically recreate the SEF url, add it back into the URL cache and bring your page back from the 404 wasteland.
|
