Hi-

I'm excited to get JoomSEF working properly for Yootheme's Zoo extension.

Is there a way to remove the category menu item alias from the URL?

I have a menu structure like this:

Services (zoo category)
- Technology (zoo category)
- - Technology Service 1 (item in the technology category, not actually a menu item)

My URLs look like:

/servicemenualias/servicecategoryalias
/technologymenualias/servicecategoryalias/technologycategoryalias
/servicesmenualias/servicescategoryalias/technologycategoryalias/technologyservice1titlealias

It would be perfect if I could remove the menu item alias completely and achieve a URL structure like:

/servicecategoryalias
/servicecategoryalias/technologycategoryalias
/servicescategoryalias/technologycategoryalias/technologyservice1titlealias

Any ideas? The parameters in the JoomSEF extension for Zoo don't seem to have an option for this.

Thanks!

Hi,

Go to Manage Extensions page in JoomSEF, open the Zoo extension parameters and on the Common tab set "Show Menu Title" option to "No". You will need to delete the already created URLs in Manage SEF URLs page and clear the JoomSEF cache for changes to take effect.

Best regards,
ARTIO Support Team

OK, perfect, thanks for the prompt response! It is refreshing :)

Now my URLs look great. Unfortunately, I am still having an itemid issue.

Since Zoo items can be in more than one category, it is not set up to search for and append the corresponding category's menu item to all item links regardless of where those links occur (modules, category lists, related items, etc) like com_content does.

I am hoping that JoomSEF's canonical URL/ignore multiple sources feature will fix this issue by making sure that the first URL created for each item/article contains the itemid of the lowest (sub)category's menu item. I'm sure it can be done with clever usage of JoomSEF params but can't get it working directly within JoomSEF.

When I purge SEFs and go to the homepage of my site, all of the item URLs get generated based on the first Zoo category menu item's itemid even if that item is not actually in that category, not for each specific category's menu item.

I managed to get it working properly by creating a unique zoo item module for each category and setting the menu item parameter in each module to the corresponding menu item. This puts the proper itemid into the item URL. I then published these to the first page I went to after purging SEF urls and it worked!

This works for me in my case with my own site, but it won't be feasible for clients as they add new content regularly.

So I guess my questions are:

1. Is there any way this can be done with the existing code by tweaking params on JoomSEF, the JoomSEF plugin for Zoo, or Zoo itself?

2. Given this huge issue that is potentially crippling zoo, is there any way it can be done by hacking the JoomSEF zoo extension, if (1) is not possible?

3. Depending on the answers to the above, is this something you are planning to implement or would we be on our own?

Thanks!

Hi,

Well there are always problems with sites which link to some content from more than one menu item. The easiest solution to avoid such problems with Itemids is to enable both the "Exclude source info (Itemid)" and "Reappend source (Itemid)" options in JoomSEF's configuration on the Advanced tab for a cost of not so nice URLs.

Another automatic solution is to use the "Number duplicate URLs" and "Ignore multiple sources" options in extension parameters to store multiple numbered URLs in the database, but the URLs won't be so nice either.

Another way to handle Itemid problems is more difficult and time consuming - using the "Ignore Itemids" option in extension parameters you can manually set the Itemids which should not be stored in the database for the particular extension.

As you described the problem it seems that the Zoo component itself should search for correct Itemids for the URLs it generates, so you could maybe contact Zoo developers about this. Anyway, we'll add this to our Requested features list, but it will take some time until we get to it.

Best regards,
ARTIO Support Team

I was having trouble with this, too, and in the end I did away with categories in my ZOO blog component. Now I'm using tags to organize content and URLs read "/blog/article-alias" This was the simplest way to work around the problem.