Mid-january this year, we had version 1.5.5. and I feel this one matters a bit more than the others. There are several reasons for that, mostly technical, so I'll go through the fixes and features added later on. But surely the first and foremost part of this release for me is the simple fact that after 10 month of absolute emptiness (the end of the free-as-in-beer era) on the improvement section, followed by 4 months of intense bug chasing and active adaptation to a new operation mode (beginning of sh404sef@Anything Digital), I - we - were back on track to what sh404sef is about : bringing search engine optimization improvements to Joomla sites. At this stage, sh404sef was really stable (which is not the same as bug-free, of course), and we were able to add new features again, instead of just playing catchup with things that did not work properly. So now, what's in version 1.5.5 ? as usual, the full sh404sef changelog will tell you all (find sh404sef changelog here ), but I'll quickly go through the main additions or changes:
1 - A much improved 404 page
Feature #1 : a better 404 page. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time - actually I described the changes made as early as October 2008, in a talk at Joomladay Switzerland, but failed to deliver ever since. Our previous 404 page was pretty dull and uninformative, and I am afraid that despite it was easily editable, few webmasters would take the time to customize it - or worse, they made .htaccess changes to redirect all 404s to the home page!
So first, I have changed the textual page content, in order to provide better information of what's happening for the poor visitor coming to your site and being faced with a missing page.
You can also notice the '404' number is not event mentioned in the displayed text. What would '404' mean to the average user of your site anyway?
Next is a new feature that will vastly increase usability and friendliness of your site : sh404sef will now search for the few most similar urls to what the visitor initially asked for, and include these urls as a clickable list of proposals. You have settings available to decide how many to display at most, whether to include pdf or print version or articles and the minimum number of letters used when doing the search (you don't want to search on 'of', 'the', 'it', etc Here are a few samples, based on a default Joomla installation Add screenshots for 3 or 4 urls
Now the page layout and content is very much still available for you to customize as you see fit. You can keep the "Similar url" feature in your own layout just by adding the tags in the page, and it will be replaced by the calculated list. Please note this feature is implemented as a standard Joomla content plugin. As a consequence, you can include the tags in whatever article or even a module you like, and it operates all the same.
2 - More control over Page title
Due to popular demand (sic), a very recent improvement to the single most important bit of On-page Search Engine Optimization element : the HTML Page title tag. Not that it was bad (in my own opinion, which you may considered biased). But many people would ask for more control on the way the Page title was built for Joomla content element.
Previously, to change the way Page title was done, you had to modify a PHP file to your liking. A complete section has now been added to the Meta/Seo tab of configuration and setting up Page title is now at your fingertips:
- choose a separator between the various parts of the title, instead of the default
- decide to insert an article section or category in the page title
- for article title, section and category, decide to use main title or alias
- and as before, insert an arbitrary string before or after your html page title tag
3 - An integrated control panel for JCal Pro® SEF url
The JCal Pro® plugin for sh404sef has long had a number of settings, but they were hidden in the plugin itself. Altering your JCal pro urls would require to modify some php files on your server. We have now improved this, and JCal pro has a dedicated section for various settings within sh404sef "Plugins" tab, alongside Virtuemart, Community Builder, Mosets Tree or MyBlog.
4 - The pagination bug
This one would deserve a post of its own! To put it shortly, changes introduced in the way Joomla handles pagination of multiple pages elements have changed between Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5. Because Joomla own SEF does not handle pagination, it does not matter for the default SEF. But for every extension handling pagination (ie: replacing ?start=10 by something like /Page-2) 3rd party developers struggled to overcome this change...
The new system in Joomla basically makes it impossible to calculate pagination properly. What makes it worse is that normally Joomla handles pagination for all 3rd-parties extension, and so few of them were still working.
The quick fix would havbe been of course to simply drop pagination alltogether. That's not how I have done things from the start. Another way, used by some other SEF extension, would simplify the problem by manually entering a single number of items page. That's a limitation compared to what Joomla can do, and thus unacceptable. Eventually, I came across a general solution that fixes the problem for Joomla content, as well as for all extensions we have tested. Let me thank Alex, from Joomfish , as the idea originated through a discussion with him
5 - The $live_site warning
This comes from one of our most common issues when supporting users. Many of them see their css or images disappear, or sometimes broken javascript. Many times, we have found the source of the problem to be a Joomla setting called $live_site. It lives inside Joomla's configuration.php file. It is meant to hold your web site root url (something like "http://www.example.com), but is usually left empty because Joomla will try to auto-detect your web site root url, most of times with good success.
However, sometimes, it fails. And if you are using a SEF url system (any system, whether Joomla SEF, sh404sef or another extension), things starts to break. That's why $live_site exists, so that you can fix the issue if it happens on your server. Considering the daily number of posts on the forum solved simply by properly filling in this parameter, we decided to add a check in sh404sef backend. So there is now a warning in sh404sef configuration panel, a reminder that probably you should fill in this parameter. You don't have to, but if you experience problems as described above, open Joomla's configuration.php using FTP, and change it.
That's all for now. Please expect another post with more details about the latest changes in sh404sef in the coming days
Regards,
Yannick
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