Hello, happy paying user here! :)
JoomSEF is working great for me. I run a large site and it really works well - love the latest updates.
However, since I have so much content, there are 'dead links' sprinkled throughout my site. JoomSEF faithfully displays the 404 error message.
This works, but does not work well for the user or the site admin. What I've been doing is going back through the 404 logs and adding custom redirects for the 404 links. However, what I would like to do is find the original content and correct the link to the new location.
I could do this by hand, but by this point there is a lot of obscure content that needs to be fixed. This could be handled by Joomsef.
For example, all content on our old site (using JoomSEF) used the .html extension. We made the decision to remove that in the current site when we upgraded Joomla 1.0 to 1.5. We imported as many of the old SEF pointers as we could but some are still missing. So for example on some pages, /information/article.html should be /information/article but JoomSEF doesn't know this and throws a 404.
So I guess my points are below, and I would either like to know how to do them currently in JoomSEF or request them as features in a future release:
1. Add 'Referrer' into the JoomlaSEF 404 Logs, to help admin troubleshoot the originating pages
2. Add 'smart' replacement, for example try to find the entry w/o extension
3. Add options to the 404 page, such as "Report this 404 to admin" which would then email the 404 error, referrer and other information to the admin.
Optionally, and I know this would require a considerate amount of coding, would be to display a 404 error page but then say "Were you looking for this page?" and a link to the content based on keywords in the url.
Thank you for your help!