Problem with SEFs

[Valdez360]

Is there a known issue when there are product categories nested three deep and sefs are turned on? I have noticed some strange behaviour where a subcategory selected from the main menu Like this:
Click on luciferase in:
http://www.howtoclone.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/plasmidproducts2/reporter-genes Which shows all the products in the shop and not the products belonging to the luciferase category.

Turning off sefs fixess it.

Please if anyone has any suggestions on how I can keep sefs I would be very grateful.

Joomla! 2.5.11, PHP5.3.10, VM 2.0.22a

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Parent category
http://www.howtoclone.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/plasmidproducts2
demonstrates you some explainable error.

[Valdez360]

Many thanks for your suggestion Maxim.

I had a top category before when the problem first appeared and now I have replaced the top level category with "plasmid products", but the problem persists.

If I select from the main menu - Plasmid Products>Reporter Genes and then when the subcategories appear click on 'Luciferase' (which contains a subcategory) then it just displays ALLthe products in the shop at the URL:

http://www.howtoclone.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/plasmid-products/reporter-genes/plasmidproducts/reporter-gene/luciferase

So it is putting 'plasmid products' into the URL twice.

If I select a category with no subctegory (just products), then it displays correctly.

I am frankly stumped.

[franzpeter]

Did you give Virtuemart Home page an entry into a Joomla menu. It looks like you did not do that or the Virtuemart home page was added after the creation of categories or subcategories.

[Valdez360]

I have found a solution:

Go to VM2 config page> templates tab and turn ON 'Show children category'..
Open menu item that is causing the trouble (in this case luciferase) and change the Menu Item Type from Virtuemart categories layout to Category Layout (still in the VM section).
It seems to work even if one doesn't select a category on the right hand side, but I have allocated the corresponding category.

Thanks for your suggestions which kept me looking rather than taking the sef route.

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Open menu item that is causing the trouble (in this case luciferase) and change the Menu Item Type from Virtuemart categories layout to Category Layout (still in the VM section).

Your web shop needs menu item for VM Categories and menu items for each VM Category as well.

And these menu items you need to create in your menus manager.

[franzpeter]

Maxim, I never would do set: create menu items for each VM Category. It makes a lot of trouble in case of meta description, meta title a.s.o.. I can just recommend to use the VM category module for categories and create just one link inside the Joomla menu for the VM frontpage (beware of creating a menu entry with VM categories).

[Maxim Pishnyak]

I can just recommend to use the VM category module for categories ...

Franzpeter, I understand your point.

But, it's Joomla templates with own customized menu modules for displaying VM categories.
It's not Joomla templates for using with VM category module exclusively.
Also I could add
It's not Joomla templates for using with custom VM category modules exclusively.
It's just subjective observation based on experience.

Last time I checked, custom menu modules >> custom VM menu modules.
Reality is such that people have much more choice of custom menu modules to choose from.

[franzpeter]

Maxim, the problem is, that you can produce a lot of double content url using joomla menu to add categories. The VM categories layout, in case of SEO, is extremely bad. You need to add an additional module just to those pages you use virtuemart categories layout. We have to see, that for crawlers the VM categories layout is just a lot of links. Often, crawlers will stop crawling because they think it is a kind of link farming. The VM category layout as Menu Item Type can be somehow problematic too. It depends on how it was created. If for example the front page is used as first menu entry (menu_item_id) and the VM Category layout items work as sublinks for example, it follows the default VM way. A biig problem here is if using a VM Category module at same time. It is mandatory to use exactly the same name for the menu item. If the names contain special characters like é, or è or ä,ö, ü a.s.o for example, it may happen that even if you use exactly the same name, the url result may be different. Meanwhile VM uses a better meta system than Joomla. It offers more possibilities to fine tune for example the robots. And it does not work with the Joomla menu item entries, so by hazard sometimes the title may be different, the Joomla menu item meta description does NOT work (you need to enter those things in the VM category definitions) a.s.o.. There are templates for example, which use the VM category module, to display VM categories inside the Joomla menu, but without creating menu items in Joomla menu itself. That is the - by far - better way. It is, if creating Joomla menu items for categories and category very difficult to maintain that. Using vm categories as Joomla menu item together with vm category menu items can produce a lot of mess, if it is not carefully maintained. For example: you create and update your categories and products with mass update tool like CSVI. Maybe you have created a few new categories and some new products inside those categories and you forget to create Joomla menu items for the new categories the following thing occurs: on the categories page you have more categories than you have declared as VM category menu item. That is very bad, because crawlers may see strange url if finding that. I think it is, if not very carefully done, a very bad idea to create Joomla menu categories items and category items for SEF routing issues. I use that only very carefully, if I would like to use modules, which should get displayed only on certain pages.