Product association missing?

prokops · March 10, 2015, 12:39:24 PM

Hello!

I am building a multilingual Joomla 3.4, VM 3.0.6.2 shop, www. liponordic. com

It seems that all product association in Virtuemart is not present in terms of "hreflang=" tags. Joomla content works just fine.

Furthermore, at the product detail level association does not work when changing language via the language switcher module. It works fine on all other levels, just not at product detail.

Could you comment on if these issues are fixable ?

Cheers,
prokop

jjk · March 10, 2015, 20:46:37 PM

Concerning the association: I would recommend to eliminate unsafe (reserved) characters in your url. For example the comma in liposomal-vitamin-c,-lipolife-gold-250-ml-50g-detail.

Also, it seems that the Joomla 3.4 language switcher is broken: See http://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/6253

Quoteproduct association in Virtuemart is not present in terms of "hreflang=" tags

Not shure what exactly you mean with this.

prokops · March 11, 2015, 09:01:23 AM

Hi jjk, thanks for your speedy answer.

QuoteI would recommend to eliminate unsafe (reserved) characters in your url. For example the comma in liposomal-vitamin-c,-lipolife-gold-250-ml-50g-detail.

Sound advice, I will implement safe urls only. However, even products with safe names do not get correctly associated with their counterparts (se example: http://www.liponordic.com/en/webshop/liposomal-products/liposomal-replacement-cap-detail).

Is this a Virtuemart issue or Virtuemart-Joomla issue?

Quoteproduct association in Virtuemart is not present in terms of "hreflang=" tags

Any given joomla content that is correctly associated produces hrelang tags in the header section of the rendered code.

Example:
www.liponordic.com/en/liposomal-science contains in it's <head> section:

Code Select

  <link href="http://www.liponordic.com/en/liposomal-videnskab" rel="alternate" hreflang="da-DK" />
  <link href="http://www.liponordic.com/se/liposomal-vetenskap" rel="alternate" hreflang="sv-SE" />
  <link href="http://www.liponordic.com/no/liposomal-vitenskap" rel="alternate" hreflang="nb-NO" />

As soon as I am in Virtuemart, no "rel="alternate" hreflang=" code is present in the header. This is very confusing as it is Virtuemart itself that manages language localization and I would expect Virtuemart to autogenerate such tags.

Can you comment on this ?

Cheers,
prokop, denmark

jjk · March 11, 2015, 09:58:08 AM

VirtueMart itself doesn't add hreflang.
Did you read this post already? http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=119696.msg407395#msg407395

Also, Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages. But if I click the british flag in your Joomla content you have lang="en-gb" in the header and it simultaniously shows the hreflang tags for three different languages (hreflang for en-GB is missing). So which one should Google use? Another 'problem' with hreflang="en-GB" is that "en" is a language code and "GB" is a country code. So you tell Google that this page is targeting english speakers in Great Britain. Do you really want to exclude the Americans and other English speaking countries?

prokops · March 17, 2015, 12:16:49 PM

Thanks for the "en-GB" notice, I made a change in the language code plugin to target "en-GB" -> "en".

The thread you refer to ends inconclusively for hreflang tags. I will try to bump the other thread.

As for the buggy product association, it seems that I need to take that to the Joomla forum.

Thanks for your help.

News:

Product association missing?

prokops

jjk

prokops

jjk

prokops