A while back I posted the solution I use for WordPress friendly URL’s on a Namesco Zeus server and it seems to have helped out a bunch of people so I thought I’d publish the script I use on Joomla.

Joomla’s standard friendly URL’s use the mod_rewrite function in an htaccess file which isn’t available when hosting on a Zeus server. You need to provide a script called rewrite.script that uses intructions Zeus understands.

Below is the code I use in my rewrite.script file. Take this code, paste it in a text editor and save it as rewrite.script. Then upload it to the web root of your Joomla installation.

map path into SCRATCH:path from %{URL}
look for file at %{SCRATCH:path}
if matched then goto RULE_END
look for dir at %{SCRATCH:path}
if matched then goto RULE_END
match URL into $ with ^/index.php
if matched then goto RULE_END
insensitive match URL into $ with (/|\.php|\.html|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$
if matched then set URL = /index.php
RULE_END:

Next go to your Joomla Global configuration and switch the Friendly URL’s on.

And fingers crossed you should have friendly URL’s switched on.

If it doesn’t work, just switch them off again in your global configuration.

Footnote – not being a Zeus server tech I’m not really sure how the script works, so can’t really supply any support on it.

UPDATE: The above script didn’t work for me when I was using SOBI2 on a Joomla site. Thankfully though Root Creative had posted a script on their site that worked perfectly. Try it if you have trouble with the one above, try Root Creative’s one.

If you’re upgrading an old version of Joomla, it can help to make sure your hosting is running both PHP5 and MySQL5.

Lots of people will still be on version 4 of both and while Joomla may seem like it installs OK, lots of components and modules with either not install or not display correctly.

However, many people are still having problems with PHP5.3 so err on the safe side and stick to 5.2 for PHP just now if you have the choice.

This is one of those niggling little problems I had this week. I usually build a Joomla site in a temporary directory of the domain it is going live on then move it to the root directory once the site launches. The normal process involves changing the temporary location in the Joomla configuration file and if you’re running Virtuemart e-commerce, change the directories in Virtuemart’s configuration file too, then move the site to the root directory.

However this week when I thought it had all gone smoothly, it appeared that secondary and additional product images were not showing up when enlarged. It turns out they were still being referenced in the old directory.

A look at the database told me that the full URL for the large version of secondary images/files had been coded into the database for every image meaning that when I moved the site, the URL’s were then pointing at empty locations.

There were two ways I could think of to solve this:

1. Use a redirect on the images directory. I just added this line at the end of the .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /temp_dir/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/ http://www.domain.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/

2. Use phpMyAdmin on your server and go through each row in the jos_vm_product_files table and edit to put the new location in the file_url field. If you’ve got a lot of images, this can take a while.

For the moment, both ways seem to work.

I’ve seen a lot of Joomla 1.5 sites recently where the homepage title is simply “Home”. Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation and you generally want your homepage title to include your best search term for the site. It’s very easy to fix though:

• From your Joomla Admin Dashboard go to Menus > Main Menu
• Click on the Home link in the table of menu items
• In the right column, open the Parameters – System tab
• Put your optimised title in the Page Title box
• If you want your optimised title to be repeated on the home page above any article titles check the Yes button below for Display Page Title. Otherwise if you just want it to show in the browser title bar leave it at No
• Save out of there and refresh your Joomla home page to find your optimised title right there in the browser title bar

It’s not just from an SEO point of view that you want that title to show up properly in Joomla. If a customer is searching for widgets and their search results present them with your site titled “Home” in the 1st position and yor competitor titled “Joe Brown’s Cheap Widget Warehouse” I think I know who’t going to get the click and the sale. So, if you are building a site in Joomla, make sure you get an optimised title on to the home page.

Not best bedfellows it turns out. I’ve been banging my head against a Joomla site all morning, trying to get formatting to stick that I’d applied on pages and it just kept getting wiped out. I use JCE as the editor on the site in question and forgot I was using the Google Chrome browser. After far too much perseverence I changed to using Firefox and as usual everything started running smoothly again. Firefox 1 Chrome 0.