| Some details about new version 1.2.4.s of sh404SEF |
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Hello all! It's been some time since last version, so I thought I would give you a few details about what has been going on, and which direction I am going with sh404SEF. When last public version was released (1.2.4.q), I thought I was going to concentrate on adding support for more 3rd party components, so that more people could have SEF url on their site. That and bug fixing should have made the next version. However, I realized from posts on various forums and emails I was getting, that several important things were missing. I therefore changed my mind, and decided to add what I think were the most important features. The overall goal is to make things easier for more people. I hope I have done that now ! Because many features were added, you may find some new bugs, even though lots of testing has taken place, by myself and also by a group of testers which I thank for their work. Thanks also to translators, who have a hard time keeping up with the pace I add new text in the component. To help them, I have setup a wiki to handle translations. It means that several people can now more easily work together to review or complete translation. So if you are fluent in both English or French and another language currently supported : Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and German, and want to help, please contact me and I'll setup an account for you on the wiki. Of course, new languages can be added if you are willing to go through a full translation.
Finally, what's new in this version ? I have worked in 4 areas to try ease the pain of users as expressed on the forum during the last few weeks. These areas are : 1 - 3rd parties components : the more components are supported the better. I have added native plugins for : myBlog, moset tree and rewritten the Docman plugin. More plugins will follow now that the component is feature-stable. To prepare for this, I have also written a documentation about how to write native plugins for sh404SEF. It should already be available in the documentation section . With this information, and the sample plugin that comes with the component, I hope people can start writing their own plugins, including 3rd parties component developers. To make things easier for them, plugins can now be loaded either from sh404SEF plugins directory, or from the component own directory. It means components author can now package sh404SEF plugins together with their component, just like they do with sef_ext files designed for OpenSEF or SefAdvanced.
2 - .htaccess : as this is a major problem for many people, I thought I would implement an old idea, first read in a thread by websmurf
in mambo days. This uses PathInfo feature of Apache (and possibly IIS
??) and allows to do real SEF URl without mod_rewrite and thus without .htaccess.
I have done testing on my sites, and it seems to be pretty robust, but
more testing is obviously needed for such an important feature. The
default mode of operation is still with .htaccess, you can activate no .htaccess mode in Advanced tab of configuration. There is also an option to set the path info bit : default is /index.php/, alternative is /index.php?/
3 - Duplicate URL management : I am talking about what
happens when several non-sef URL yields the same SEF URL. In previous
versions, sh404SEF would just use the first non-SEF URL and forget
about the other ones. In last version, I added the ability to record
additionnal non-sef URL. In this version, you can : Obviously, I have also fixed a number of bugs, plus made some minor changes : - if no plugin or sef_ext file is found for a component, sh404SEF now falls back to Joomla SEF instead of non -sef. - Changed category/section blog/table handling, to remove the /Table/ string, caused some concerns to many users - added a workaround for Virtuemart vmcchk=1 parameter. Due to the way Virtuemart does a cookie check since version 1.0.10, Google search results are full of URL with vmchk=1 (or /vmchk/ if using sh404SEF). I now detect if the page is requested by a search engine, and if so I make Virtuemart think that the cookie check has already been done and was successfull. So pages are indexed with the proper URL, and does not show the Message 'Your browser does not accept cookies..." - added a workaround for Fireboard Discuss bot : Discuss bot needs a hack in Fireboard to work properly. I now handle this within sh404SEF, so that Discuss bot should work without hack in Fireboard (newfrombot param is changed into newFromBot, which is what Fireboard expects) - automatic redirect between www and non-www version of the site. Many people had problems with this. Non-sef url would "work" if the site was accessed from www.domain.com or from domain.com. However, from a SEO standpoint, this is BAD. So now sh404SEF will automatically do a 301 redirect to the live site address. For instance, if your live site address is www.mydomain.com (as per Joomla general configuration setting), then URL starting with mydomain.com will be redirected to their equivalent starting with www.domain.com. If your live site address is mydomain.com, then all URL starting with www.mydomain.com will be redirected to their equivalent starting with mydomain.com - trailing slash before 404 : before declaring that a requested page is not found (error 404), sh404SEF will now try find it again after adding a trailing slash. For instance, if a URL is : mysite.com/documentation/, then some people may type mysite.com/documentation in their browser. Before, this would have generated a 404 error. Now sh404SEF will correctly fetch the proper page.
That's all for now. Hope you like it.
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