Problems with VM item ID and SEF

[Menace]

Hello all,

My first site with VM is in developement and now I am getting in contact with SEF URLs and with this I am faced with some issues I don't really understand.

I'm using VM 2.0.12f with Joomla! 2.5.4

My homesite is VM Startpage, displaying topten products and a module with featured products. This Startpage is assigned to the main menu as 'Home'. VM categories each are assigned to the same menu on lower levels.

• I noticed the following things with SEF turned OFF for both, VM and Joomla!
  If I click on a category and then on a product I get to the correct details page with all modules I assigned to the category and correct pagelayout. Everythings fine so far. If now I click the same product from VM startpage in fetaured products module, I get to the product details page but without the modules and pagelayout that should be displayed. I noticed, that the URLs are different. The URL that are generated on startpage don't have the itemid at the end of the URL
  
  Is that working as intended?
  
  
• With SEF turned ON for both, VM and Joomla!
  The Problem seems to be solved as both links to a product from category and startpage lead to the same product detailspage which is now displayed correctly.
  
  Is it really solved? Or will searchengines count this as two different links to same content?
  
  




• A related problem is a redirect that VM does, that I don't understand.
  If I use a wrong URL in the way 'www.mysite.com/qwerty (or anything senseless here)' I get redirected to 'www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart. This shows just the topten module without all other modules assigned to my normal VM startpage.
  
  This is very confusing to me. Shouldn't there normally be a 404 error if a nonexisting URL is entered?

I hope somebody can help me at least partly understanding this.

- Martin -

[zanardi]

I know this topic has been silent for a while, but I have exactly the same issue as in point 3. above.
The issue is related to VirtueMart being the default menu item, you get a correct 404 error if you set another component as default.
So I guess it has to do with VirtueMart router.php rules.

[Maxim Pishnyak]

You're wrong, don't having Virtuemart as menu item (not necessary default) could produce error.

[zanardi]

@Maxim:
these are different topics.

I know that you have to set at least one menu item for VirtueMart, else you may get errors, and that's ok.

But if you *do* have a menu item for VirtueMart, and that item is the *default* Joomla menu item, you'll get the issue reported by the op, i.e. the "Redirect" component is ignored.

[vaskern]

I belive updating the .htaccess solved the problem of redirecting to index.php?option=com_virtuemart instead of producing 404 for me. So now a 404 seems to be produced and also VM tries to find an appropriate URL.
But I can't get Joomlas redirect manager to work, even if I set the default menu item to a Joomla article?