Description

SEF Wizard is an extension intended to improve native Joomla! SEF (acronym for search engine friendly) and human readable URL. The package contains a system plugin – Engine, and a backend component – Controls. It has simple logic and high performance.

Options

  • Removing IDs from the URL of standard Joomla! components.
  • Removing page duplicates: redirect 301 to the canonical page, block duplicates with an error 404, setting the canonical link in duplicates, setting the NOINDEX meta-tag for non-SEF URLs. There are several duplicate filtration modes that can give you flexibility or straightforwardness in duplicate handling.
  • Beautiful pagination: you can set custom pagination tags instead of native non-SEF query string parameters – the pagination tags become the part of URL, for example category/article/page-1
  • “Smart” error handler. Create a customized error page based on your template. The design of your template will be saved, as well as all modules you are using.
  • Sending email notifications about fatal errors on your site.
  • Improving of the tag routing (correction of URLs like component/tags/tag/item).
  • Robots.txt editor, that allows you to edit this file from the admin panel.
  • Redirect manager that allows you to externally or internally redirect locations to new URLs with the HTTP status codes of your choosing. In redirect rules, you can use regular or exact expressions. Works with absolute and relative URLs as well. It has UTF-8 support that allows to work with UTF-8 domains without punicode.

See demonstration
Get the extension
Read the change log

Integrity

The package uses Joomla! updater. The updater will check for a new version only if you install the package entirely from the single archive, as it is supplied by the developer. If you install the component and the plugin separately, the updater will not be active neither for the component, nor for the plugin. Although the component can work without the plugin, some options will not be available without the “Engine” installed. The “Engine” itself will not work without the “Controls” installed. It is not recommended to use the extensions separately, all of them should be installed and enabled. To uninstall all SEF Wizard extensions, it would be enough to uninstall only the package – the other extensions will be removed automatically.

Installation and usage

  1. Install the package via Joomla! extension manager.
  2. Navigate to the component with the administration menu.
  3. Enable the options you need.

SEF Settings

Remove IDs from standard Joomla! components
Removing IDs from standard Joomla! components, such as com_content, com_contact, com_tags, com_newsfeeds. If you do not use a component, do not enable the according option, as it can increase performance.
Remove page duplicates

You can handle page duplicates by setting 301 redirects to canonical pages or by throwing a 404 error. If you want to redirect the old pages to the pages without IDs, select the redirect option. If your website is new, there is no need in redirects, so it is recommended to throw a 404 error. We can guarantee that page duplicates will be removed correctly from standard Joomla! components. Although the same method is used for third-party components, a large number of them does not allow to check if this option works right. Therefore, you can select if you want to use the option for standard components only or for third-party as well.

Separately, you can disable indexing any non-SEF URL containing the query string, e.g. /category/article?tmpl=component. The robots meta-tag <meta name='robots' content='noindex' /> will be set for all pages with the URL containing a quotation mark ?.

Content SEF

This section determines the com_content SEF settings, such as pagination. Unlike standard query string pagination parameters, e.g. /category/article?showall=&page=10 custom pagination tags become the part of URL, e.g. /category/article/page-10, /category/article/showall. If the duplicate removing option is activated, the URLs with query string pagination are proccessed according to the selected mode. This setting is available only if the standard Joomla! plugin “Content - Page break” is enabled.

Page number tags and the showall tag can contain only UTF-8 word characters, digital symbols, underscores (_) and hyphens (-), e.g. page, chapter, showall.

The first page URL with a tag /category/article/page-1 and the page without a tag /category/article are identical. They are “useful” duplicates that may be convenient for users. For the SEO, it may be recommended to disable indexing pages with the URL containing the first page tag. If the according option is enabled, the robots meta-tag <meta name='robots' content='noindex' /> will be set for all pages with the URL containing the first page tag. The option is available only if the “beautiful pagination” is activated.

The full text tag may be convenient for users, but search engines may treat such pages as content duplicate. If the according option is enabled, the robots meta-tag <meta name='robots' content='noindex' /> will be set for all pages with the URL containing the full text tag. The option is available only if the “beautiful pagination” is activated.

When page navigation is present, the title meta-tag must contain the current page number so that it does not be repeating. For resolving this issue you can enable the option that will override the title for pagination. To enable the option, you need to specify the title mask: %t – meta-title, %n – page number, %p – the word that means “page”. You can override the value of the language constant PLG_SEFWIZARD_PAGE for your language in order to change the “page” word. The title variable and the page number variable are mandatory, so they must present in the mask. The page word variable is not required and can be omitted. For example, the mask %t (%p %n) determines the following title meta-tag structure: Article title (page 1). If you do not want SEF Wizard to rewrite the title meta-tag, leave the according field empty.

Tags SEF
Sometimes, native Joomla! router ignores linking tags to menu items, wherein the URL of these tags looks like /component/tags/tag/item. If this option is enabled, the plugin will correct tag paths “on the fly” if they are built incorrectly.
System settings

In this section you can enable the SEF Wizard redirect manager (disabled by default) and determine, whether to use UTF-8 domain names in the redirect manager instead of punicode. In this section you can also enable integration with the wbAMP system plugin, check the script execution time and debug router variables.