If you’ve just installed and started setting up a Joomla based site, one of the things that you should do is enable search engine friendly (SEF) URLs. (If you don’t know why you should do this, you should definitely check out Google’s search engine optimization starter guide). You do this by logging as an administrator to your brand new Joomla site, clicking on the “site” menu, then “global configuration” from the drop-down menu. You should see box entitled “SEO settings” like that pictured. Assuming that you’re hosting your site on a unix based machine running the Apache webserver, you’ll likely want to select Yes for both “Search Engine Friendly URLs” and “Use Apache mod_rewrite” options. However, if you do this and you find your site breaks, there’s two things you should check before doing more advanced trouble-shooting:
SEO settings box on the global configuration page in the Joomla 1.5 administror interface.
- When you initially upload your the files for your new Joomla 1.5 site to your host, the htaccess file is named “htaccess.txt”. Most standard Apache configurations won’t recognize this as a valid htaccess file. If your SEF URLs are not working, you will likely need to rename the file to “.htaccess”. If you don’t know what an htaccess file is, check out the Wikipedia writeup on htaccess files. The reason the htaccess file was named with a .txt extension (I’m assuming) is that some FTP programs won’t show hidden files & the file won’t be uploaded with the other files as a result.
- The second option “Use Apache mod_rewrite” may break your site when you turn it on. Now that your htaccess file is properly named so that Apache will recognize it, you may need to uncomment the line in the htaccess file that reads “
# RewriteBase /“. To ‘uncomment’, you simply delete the pound symbol (#) (a save the file). I’m assuming here that you’ve installed your Joomla site in your root web directory. Further changes will be necessary if you’ve set up your site in a subdirectory of your web root directory — this is beyond the scope of this post.
Anyway, I hope the two small tips above help you resolve any issues you may be having with turning on the basic SEF URL feature in your new Joomla based site.
