Ok, this is really annoying. I purged all of the URL's and reset everything, and the problem went away. It has worked fine for the last 2 days, but now it's giving me 404's again on every page except for the homepage. I have no clue what is causing it, and it's really annoying that it just pops up after everything has been working fine for a day or 2. I cannot keep purging my urls because that makes the site extremely slow when it has to create all of the url's again. Any idea on how I can fix this?

Ok. fixed my problem. I am not sure how it happened, but somehow my RewriteEngine On got commented out in my htacess file. Very strange since I did not access the htaccess file until after the problem started, so I have no idea how it happened, but it is fixed now.

David Henderson wrote:


Maybe it got commented out by some other components that were installed lately .. Just the thought :)

Some of you may think I have no business using Joomla since I am not a developer but a business owner and end user... but I have been using Joomla for my 3rd business in the hope to transfer my expensive CMS system to Joomla for my main business. The one thing that irritated me was the unfriendly URLs - so I installed JoomSEF 1.5...

I am not an advanced user (how can you tell!!??) so I am sure some of you knowledgable people may be able to help me before I try the paid support from ARTIO... as I am not having alot of luck so far.

The htaccess file was automatically updated whn I installed JoomSEF and VirtuemartSEF.
In initial inspection some links worked from my home page - and others showed the new URL but directed me to the home page instead of the original link/page/address.... didn't have any 404 errors at that point.

Enabled the reappend option in the JoomSEF. This fixed some links but others showed as 404s.

I changed the Enable SEF's in Joomla configuration but it said I needed to change the name of the htaccess.txt file to .hatccess before I enabled this function in Joomla. So I did that. Now all links apart from the homepage are 404 errors - not found on server.

Now I cannot see the .htaccess file - how do you access this.

Sorry for such a dumb question - you guys all seem very knowledgeable compared to me being a new user.... my site is www.horsestuff.co.nz but I have set JoomSEF enabled to NO now since nothing works.

Hi
I am replying to this because I had a similar problem and I guess I have the same 'expert' status.
Having received all the 500 and 404 errors I fiddled around with the.htaccess file and as per the JoomSEF documentation commented in and out, all to no avail.
I finally got everything working by commenting out one additional line as follows
#Options FollowSymLinks.
I suppose this is server specific but this suggestion is offered in the original .htaccess file which is included with JOOMLA

It is well worth the effort to get joomSEF to work the URL's it generates are excellent.

Editing the .htaccess file will depend on your server set up ( sometimes it is hidden from an FTP listing). I could not do it by FTP but I did manage to use an editing tool provided by my hosting company listed under 'file manager'. But it will be possible to edit that file one way or another.

To see the .htaccess file you can use a ftp-client called Filezilla. It's excellent for tis kind of work, because it also works well to change the access rights on files.