How can I delete the category from Virtuemart urls?

[jeetjezeg]

Maybe there are some reasons why in VM2 the categories are in the URL's, but I definitely don't want this on our website. How can I remove it?

[Click SSL]

If you move a product to a different category or remove it from a category, the url will always change. Otherwise VirtueMart has no chance to determine to which category a product belongs. If you want to keep the original url, I would simply type something like "archived product/sold out" into the availability field.

From- http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=19c9117d715002105a029d0891e48d0d&topic=111461.msg374728#msg374728

[jeetjezeg]

Thanks, but I don't need to move any products or anything, I just want my URL's to be nice. In the old Virtuemart this wasn't a problem at all.

Can't wait till this bug is fixed, I almost regret migrating to VM2 actually...

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Thanks, but I don't need to move any products or anything, I just want my URL's to be nice.

Oh God! Use Joomla Redirect Component. Rest in peace!

[jeetjezeg]

Thanks, but I don't need to move any products or anything, I just want my URL's to be nice.

Oh God! Use Joomla Redirect Component. Rest in peace!

Oh god! That's not really a solution, is it? Since VM 2 should be a improvement over VM1, why don't they just do it right? Hopefully at least support for sh404SEF will be improved... For the first time since using Joomla for years, I've been considering Wordpress for this particular website.

[jjk]

VM2's SEO is much better than it ever was in VM1. I wonder why you insist on deteriorating your SEO (Maybe you prefer to end up on page 250 of the search engine results). And sh404sef will not help to make the standard Joomla/VM2 SEF urls better. Instead it will slow down your shop considerably as your number of products grows.
That's because products in a shop like VirtueMart are accessible in various ways and extensions like sh404sef store each possible url in their database table. So when you have i.e. 1000 products, sh404sef might have 5000 different urls in it's database which you have to maintain (numbers not measured - just a possible example).

[AH]

Agree completely

sh404sef - euch!

Nightmare to maintain and makes sites SOOOOOOO slow!

[jjk]

@Hutson
sh404sef and similar extensions were useful for small Joomla 1.5 sites, but nowadays - especially when used for a shopping cart - I think the result is similar to this small cart desaster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buFcalm3BF4

[AH]

  

Difference is that they managed to sort out the donkey problem!

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Thanks, but I don't need to move any products or anything, I just want my URL's to be nice.

Oh God! Use Joomla Redirect Component. Rest in peace!

Oh god! That's not really a solution, is it? Since VM 2 should be a improvement over VM1, why don't they just do it right?

You're wrong. Using redirects is the TYPICAL solution in SEO practice.

Did we bought tickets to spectating your TRAGEDY "MY CATEGORY LINKS MUST REMAIN THE SAME TILL THE END OF WORLD"??

What did you do with promoting these links? You had printed em on your visit cards or what?

[jjk]

Nevertheless it would be nice to know why jeetjezeg thinks that an url like domain/product1' is important.

[AH]

Indeed it would be useful to know why the category that a product belongs to is not useful in the URL

[jeetjezeg]

Ok, so I'm trying to accept that all of our URLs will change big time because of VM2, and yes maybe it's not so bad after all. We use the URLs in our communication a lot, and many products are in more than one categorie and it just gets very confusing which URL to communicate (which category to choose?). Also I just prefer shorter urls...

But can I please ask you guys something else, that is related to this. While accepting that our URLs will be much longer from now on, I find it difficult to accept that VM in some cases adds even more to the URL. When I'm in a category and I want to navigate to the next page, the url changes from this: site.com/category/product-name to this: site.com/categories/home/category/results13-24. This also happens when I'm creating a sitemap with Xmap.

I really don't want this, I think it's ugly and very unnecessary, and also it's just very confusing that every page within VM 2 has several URLs. How can I avoid that these words are being added to my URLs? And why 'categories' (which is not in the site language by the way) as well as 'home'? Why home?

[Maxim Pishnyak]

site.com/category/product-name to this: site.com/categories/home/category/results13-24

Create menu link to your "category" directly (each of em). It could be menu link(s) in hidden menu.

[jeetjezeg]

site.com/category/product-name to this: site.com/categories/home/category/results13-24

Create menu link to your "category" directly (each of em). It could be menu link(s) in hidden menu.

I'm only using the default VM category module and I have the VM Frontpage assigned to my main menu...
So I should create a manual menu with all the categories in stead of using the default VM category module you think?