Joomla 1.5 SEF now (partially) working!

[unleash.it]

Hi everyone, I just downloaded the latest nightly build of Joomla 1.5. The download site had been down for awhile but it was finally updated. I'm not sure, but I think it might have finally gone stable as they now have a code freeze. Anyways after installing I turned on the native SEF urls and bingo, it worked...at least on Joomla pages. VM pages still have parameters, but they start with shop.php (for me since I linked the VM component to that) and are shorter. Nevertheless, everything is working all the way through checkout.

Is VM 1.1 going to have SEF urls natively, or will we have to use a 3rd party component?

[aravot]

I personally have not looked at SEF with Joomla 1.5 and VM 1.1, and don't think I would, until at least almost all bugs are fixed than, if time permits.

[unleash.it]

Of course I'm only one person and I don't doubt it needs more work. But with my configuation on my site, it appears to be working without a hitch so far. I've tested it over the last couple of days and not a problem. Before Joomla updated, all VM links would simply return to the home page. Whatever the Joomla developers did, it fixed that in the new release. Again, at least on my website it seems to be working fine.

[Michael Mais]

Thanks unleash, your information solved my display problem in VM 1.1!
Michael

[unleash.it]

Michael, I had that same problem for awhile off and on. I believe it was related to Firebug but at some point, upgrading VM made it go away for me. To be on the cautious side, I did find this in the VM 1.1 user manual by Soeren:

Search Engine Friendly URLs.  Reommended: Off

VirtueMart is fully SEF compatible, but please note that some
the SEF links for VirtueMart, which are generated by Joomla's /
Mambo's SEF module or others, sometimes lead to "URL
redirection limit exceeded..." or internal server errors.

The Joomla devs made some fixes to the router and since the latest upgrade, so far I haven't experienced any problems on either my local or remote (shared) hosting. This is my own experience and is by no means official.

Still, VM URLs seem to work fine with SEF on, but are NOT SEF. Can anyone say if true SEF urls are in the woodwork for the stable VM 1.1? Are we going to get urls like: www.acme.com/category/product.html  when all is complete...without the need of a 3rd party addon?

[landsknecht]

J!1.5 uses a callback routine for SEF that needs to be done on a per component basis.  It uses a remarkably simple methodology to operate and once the router.php is made, as long as all URL calls are done through JRoute::_(URL_to_link) will generate a SEF URL.

But after grepping through the VM files, it looks like there is no use of JRoute anywhere.  So no SEF for VM. 

[unleash.it]

But are you sure? I'm definitely not a PHP expert...especially with OOP...so I'm a little unclear on this. The documentation seems to say that SEF is supported:

$sess Used to build (SEF-enabled) URLs that can be used in links.
Usage: <a href="<?php echo $sess->url( $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] .'?page=shop.product

4. Session handling
Joomla provides a framework with session handling - no need to have an own session class!
No hidden_session() calls are needed anymore. The existing session class has become the global
link formatter! The functions url and purl are needed to format links SEF or append the Itemid
parameter.

But in the example and thoughout out the code I see hard coded parameters. Perhaps this just means that VM will be compatible with SEF, but not SEF itself? Anyone know for sure if 1.1 will eventually be compatible with native SEF or not? Great to hear the news of the the release btw!