Comments on: Joomla SEF – An Amazing Support Story

By: BigBear

BigBear — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:39:46 +0000

Simbarashe,
Thanks for sharing – and for the note about registration – we do a get a few reports of issues with the captcha, however 6 people registered in the past hour – and the alternative, i.e. not using captcha, results in dozens of spam bot registrations each day…

By: Simbarashe Munhemba

Simbarashe Munhemba — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:11:56 +0000

I have been having a nightmare getting my site SEF. I however used the medium lazy approach and its now working.

I personally recommend, using a combination of the joomla! SEF patch, JoomSEF component by Artio (free or paid version) and Joomap component.

How?

I have placed an article with some useful files on my site http://www.tasimbatech.co.za/joomla-15x-articles

I hope you also find this useful and it meets your approval.

By the way registration is acting up on your site, could you please look into it.

Simba

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:16:22 +0000

I bought it because of the nice URL’s which I wanted as well, but unfortunately the rest of the extension was unworkable…And the company ignored me once they got my $$, which really pisses me off!

By: BigBear

BigBear — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:08:49 +0000

Damn! Tim that sux…

I have had slow down issues as well – I fixed these simply by turning caching on. Though I was not that impressed that AceSEF was performing over 300 database requests on page load… might also be teh fault of K2 – not sure.

I now have two people who have not been happy with AceSEF… I must say they did respond quickly to my first support requests – and things were adjusted very quickly – I’m sad you have had not an equal experience…

The other thing that has sold me on AceSEF is that it is the only SEF extension that will give me nice URL’s for Joomla and K2… I really needed this – nothing else works…

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:24:42 +0000

Buyer Beware with aceSEF!! I purchased this product, spend several weeks trying to get it to work. It is filled with bugs. I asked for a refund and was denied/ignored. They took my money and did not give me a workable product. They ignored my support posts, and said everything will be fixed in the next release, which I waited for…and the latest release just created more issues!

If you want more details on my situation go here http://www.mycampspot.com (this is not a spam site. Just a throwaway site I have used to document my issues with acesef.)

Bottom Line…I paid for a product, they took my money. The product did not work, and they kept my money!

By: Kheyann

Kheyann — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:24:52 +0000

Hello BigBear,

My host is: 4GoodHoating.com
My control panel is: EPanel with Fantastico providing the software installing/uninstalling.

Thanks again for your amazing support.

By: BigBear

BigBear — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:03:03 +0000

Kheyann,
Firstly – permissions are different from file group/ownership.
Yes you can set permissions to be open to get around various problems – but this is a security risk.
The solution is to get your host to review the group/owner of the files.
Your other question – to remove /joomla/ from the URL – what you want to do here is shift your entire site from the /joomla/ directory into the root directory – In most cases this is most easily accomplished with your web hosts file manager. some hosts do not provide a good file manager though – in which case I would recommend using Joomlapack.

After shifting all the files you need to open your configuration.php and look for any path that included /joomla/ – you need to modify these to the new path which will not include /joomla/.

Before you do anything tell me what host and control panel you are using.

By: Kheyann

Kheyann — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:53:07 +0000

Thank you BigBear,
I have just obtained Fetch-FTP, and I have discovered how to change permissions using Fetch. However this does not solve the original problem: That being, my Elder site-viewers want to go to the domain_name_website not to go to domain_name_website/joomla to find my new website information. In fact most of my Elders have had domain_name_website (without the “/joomla” added), business cards printed saying that’s where my website is!!!
How can I make “/joomla” invisible so that “domain_name_website” is the URL for the Home Page: http://www.domain_name_website/joomla/index.php

Again thank you for your assistance in these matters.

By: BigBear

BigBear — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:20:07 +0000

Kheyann,

You honour me with your comment. Thank you.

Regarding your issue – If your configuration.php is still unwritable I would do the following – contact your host and ask them to check ownership/file permissions for your Joomla installation, and specifically configuration.php.

I would say if this is a fresh install of Joomla, and you are having issue with the one file you may end up having issues with all the files eventually – the reason is straight forward and is simply that the files on the web server need to be ‘owned’ by Joomla so it can manipulate them – with some luck you get your host to do this once and then you are good to go. However some hosts do have ongoing issues with this…

You can actually modify ownership yourself with shell access – not all hosts allow this and it’s fairly advanced – so best to just ask them to do it as a first step.

Lastly if all else fails and you just want to tun on SEF URL’s – you can actually do this manually by editing your configuration.php via FTP – download it and look for the following:
var $sef = ‘0′;
var $sef_rewrite = ‘0′;
var $sef_suffix = ‘0′;

Change the 0 to 1 and re-upload.

The first var is for SEF URL’s turned on

The 2nd var is to use Apache mod_rewrite (I recommend this but make sure you also rename htacces.txt to .htaccess)

The 3rd var is to add a .html suffix to the end – I often leave this one off.

So my settings are typically:
var $sef = ‘1′;
var $sef_rewrite = ‘1′;
var $sef_suffix = ‘0′;

This last manual method is not really recommended as you really want to get the ownership/permissions thing sorted so you don’t have ongoing issues.

Cheers

Big Bear

By: Kheyann

Kheyann — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:56:42 +0000

Thank you BigBear for responding not only via your website but also emailing me. In my humble opinion, your concern and action on my behalf toward JoomACE, is significantly more “amazingly supportive” than JoomACE’s reply. As I understand it, one must purchase the $39USD AceSEF to have JoomACE even respond via their ticket system.

I think only people who are substantially Joomla and SEF knowledgeable should risk their $19USD on AceSEP; because they know how to get this amazing support, and they know how to filter a forum for an answer other than JoomACE’s. And for those who don’t have this knowledge expect the usual angry brush-off “companies don’t give email support— only people such as you BigBear

BigBear you’re the amazing support!