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Looking at a sample URL, we can see that it consists of:
Section name - Category name - Title.
Let's shorten that a bit.
- Click on the SEF tab
- Change the Content URL Structure to /Category/Title.
- Click Save.
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Hmm... nothing happened. The URL is the same as before.
Why is that? The problem is, OpenSEF already mapped this URL. That is, it already created a readable URL to correspond to the not-so-readable Joomla URL. It did that when we clicked on the link the first time. The new mapping scheme will only apply to mappings that are created from now on this site.
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Let's see how these mappings work. Click on Manage Friendly URLs.
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The mappings are listed. The indicated mapping is showing the URL we clicked on before. We could delete it, in which case OpenSEF will make a new mapping according to our new specifications. But let's try something else...
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If we click on the mapping, we get the Edit Friendly URL screen. We can then
- change the URL to whatever we want
- click Save.
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Now when we try to refresh the page with the previously mapped URL, no page is found, because OpenSEF doesn't recognize that URL any more.
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Now that we've seen how mappings work, we're ready to use OpenSEF to take care of mapping the old non-Joomla pages of this site to the new Joomla pages.
Here's a page on the old site that is still accessible. However, we don't want users to view this page. We want users to get one of the new pages when they enter the old URL into their browser.
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Back in the OpenSEF Administration, we'll select New Friendly URL.
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- In this case the Friendly URL is the old, non-Joomla URL (without the domain name). This is the URL users will be entering into the browser. This is a "relative URL", meaning, we just enter the URL without the domain name, that is, "/ref.html".
- The Internal URL is the URL of the Joomla page we want users to go to when they enter the "friendly URL" in their browser. In this case, we got this URL from the mapped URL that we previously looked at. The internal URL was listed on the list of mappings we saw before. Note: this URL has no leading slash.
- Click Save.
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When we click Save, we return to the Friendly URLs mappings list, and can see that our new mapping is listed.
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Returning to our site, we enter the old URL which we just mapped, and see that the new mapping isn't working... why is that?
The reason is that the old page still exists on the server. When the server receives a request for a page, it first looks for a file matching that page name. If it finds it, it will send back that file to the browser. Otherwise, it will try something else, like looking in the rules from the .htaccess file.
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Here's the ref.htm file on the server (viewed in FileZilla).
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Now when we refresh the old URL in the browser, the Joomla page mapped to this URL is displayed.
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OpenSEF has a number of other useful features.
Here is the OpenSEF page for setting up a Google Sitemap. A Google Sitemap can be used to make your site more easily indexable by Google.
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The SEO Assistant page has a number of useful "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) features such as showing Google Page Rank or Search Engine Position.
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More features are being adding to OpenSEF at a rapid pace. OpenSEF even has a tool to allow you to check for upgrades and install them automatically.
- Here we've selected Upgrades and Addons in the Tools and Utilities section
- We're getting an error message because this server is not set up to allow php to open remote urls. This will depend on your hosting provider. For some hosts, adding the line "php_flag allow_url_fopen on" to your .htaccess file will fix this problem.
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