Hi,
On one of my website I was getting a lot of errors like this (from error_log):
File does not exists: public_html/category-name, refferer http://website.com/category-name/product-name-alias.with-dots.in-it/
... and users that were trying to access those products were blocked by server firewall because they were generating a lot of errors like that one.
The server simply thinks that the url is pointing to a file on the server.
I found a temporary solution that does not involves re-editing the products aliases by modifying the RewriteCond rule in Joomla! .htaccess (using default sef component/settings) from this
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC]
to this
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC]
Basically, I removed the condition that blocks the dot in the url /[^.]*
After a test with Joomla's com_content component, I noticed that alias it's created normally, without dots (if any in title), so this is VM related.
I see also that this happens with VM 2.6.6.
*Probably, using a sef component will solve this, but for those that use the default sef it is a problem.
**This also happens for category alias & manufacturer alias.
Thank you Tanase for the solution with the htaccess.
We follow this standard http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738 .
. are completly allowed and it is a wrong server configuration. We may add a config, so that people can exclude the dots optionally.
You welcome!
I understand. I thought that Joomla itself has a standard for url rewriting since in its default components does not allow dots on aliases (are automatically converted in dashes (-)).
Also, I'm using the default .htaccess file that comes with Joomla! - at the beginning I thought that my .htaccess was old from previous Joomla 2.5.x versions so I downloaded a fresh install and replaced it.
An option like that would be great!
Thank you :)
LE: I see that .htaccess for Joomla! 3.x has the same line that blocks the dot. Maybe the Joomla! team should apply this solution for components that allows dots in alias.
Interesting,... it seems that a double dot can be still a security problem http://serverfault.com/questions/551015/apache-forbidden-with-dot-in-url
So removing the dot, protects week server setups. Then lets filter it again.