serious problem with incorrect URLs

[guybr]

Hi, I'm using VM 2.6.6 in a multilingual environment ("all" languages, EN-GB, German and Hebrew), and I've found that my site has a series of problems with URLs to my category and product pages.

My site (historama.com) is designed like this: a homepage + informational pages based on Joomla article pages, and a link to the VM homepage which is my online store.

On my homepage I have a brown menu which appears on all my site pages (swmenupro module), a product gallery (dj media tools) and some text in a custom HTML module. From here I started finding problems with my URLs:

On my EN-GB site, the problems look like this:
If I click on a parent category on my brown swMenuPro menu, like "Judaic Medals", I get this URL which leads to a page lacking my top blue nav bar and most of the modules I have in the side-bar:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&lang=en

But if I click on the link I placed in my custom HTML module on the same page, I get this URL which displays the category page correctly:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&Itemid=621&lang=en

What's wierd, is that if I click the "History Shop" link in my top blue nav bar and from that VM homepage I click on "Judaic Medals" in my brown store menu, I DO get routed to the correct URL:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&Itemid=621&lang=en

The same type of problem arises if I click on an object in my gallery display on my homepage or on the same gallery which appears on my store homepage:
from the gallery my Joomla homepage, a product link looks like this - and leads to a mis-rendered page just like a link from the brown store menu:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?
option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=19&virtuemart_category_id=1&lang=en

and from the gallery on my VM homepage, a product link looks like this - and leads to a correctly displayed page, just like a link from the brown store menu on a VM page:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=114&virtuemart_category_id=21&Itemid=621&lang=en

---
The situation is more complex with my German and Hebrew versions of the site:

From the German homepage, if I click "Judische Medaillen" on the brown menu I get sent to a mis-rendered version of the page lacking the blue top nav bar menu:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&categorylayout=0&Itemid=659&lang=de
NOTE that here the word "categorylayout" is added to the URL, unlike with the EN-GB link from my homepage

AND UNLIKE the EN-GB case, where from the VM homepage ("history shop") onwards the brown store menu links work fine, here and in Hebrew the links continue to send me via URLs which contain the words "categorylayout", to the mis-rendered pages.

But if I click "Medaillen" in my custom HTML module text, the URL link brings me to the correctly rendered version of the page -  NOTE that the itemid is different to the link above:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&Itemid=618&lang=de

I added VM's built-in full category list module for this QA and clicking on the "Judische Medaillen" link there (from the German homepage) lead me to a mis-rendered version of the category page, lacking both the top nav bar menu and the side bar modules. NOTE that this URL differs from the one from the brown store menu in that it doesn't reference an itemid at all:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&lang=de

Needless to say, from the moment I enter the incorrectly laid out page, any VM page link I subsequently press brings me to more and more pages which lack the menus and modules. Furthermore, between the correctly display pages to the incorrectly displayed ones, the itemid for the same items are different.


What's gone wrong? This sitution didn't exist until a day or two ago, when I completed translating my VM categories into German and Hebrew via the Joomla menu manager. I've been doing QA all along and now for some reason, I'm discovering this absurd and damaging problem.


Here are things I've done that may have brought this about, but I have no idea why or how to fix them:
1. in order for the swmenupro menu to pick up the translated German and Hebrew category names (and link to them) I created their full lists as hidden Joomla menus. Each menu item was set as a "category layout" as that was the only available option that looked correct for me to use. However it looks like that's what caused the German and Hebrew swMenuPro menu link URLs to include the word "categorylayout" in the URL and mess up the display... I didn't do this for my EN-GB as the swMenuPro module picked up the default English names fine.

2. My site was originally set up to use Joomla's SEF until during the multilingual creation stage I started to run into serious redirect and 404 problems, and disabled it.

I've cleared my cache many times now but that doesn't make a difference. I do see many URLs in the redirect component - I don't know how they got there.

Can anyone help??

[guybr]

Other may run into this problem, so here's how it got solved: I called Australia...

...and spoke with Sean White who created the swMenuPro module, and asked him how his module ordinarily supports multilingual sites. His reply was simple and perfect: when creating parallel Joomla menus of the VM categories for each language use "EXTERNAL URL" as the menu item source (and not Virtuemart "Category Layout" as I'd done). It worked!

That said, this is not a module problem: the instructions for making VM multilingual are not sufficiently clear on the point of how users enable their VM categories to be 'read' by modules in general - including VM's built in category accordion.

Beyond that, I don't understand why it is that if we translate the category names in the VM category manager, that the rest of VM/Joomla is unable to pick-up on the obvious association between the default language category name and the associated translations of that same name, when I use modules or plugins. If such a functionality existed (for VM 2.6) it would save us a ton of finger-clicking and lost time due to logistical mistakes.

[jenkinhill]

VM2.6.6 is old and very insecure, 2.6.18 is the current VM2 version. As development is now firmly with VM3, IMHO only any arising security issues are likely to fixed for the old series.