Hi!

We've been running rather big Joomla websites for the past 5 years and all of them using SefAdvance.

SefAdvance is by far the best running Sef-engine in our perspective, but free components like SHS404 and Artio, get's a LOT of support from the different programmers of 3rdparty compoments.

A year or so ago, we decided that we wanted this support, to get "proper" URLs for all our components, and not only the ones that supported SefAdvance.

Now we're migrating to 1.5 and I'm not sure what to do.

Alternative 1: go back to SefAdvance
Alternative 2: stay SHS404.

We using CB, GroupJive, Tree, MyBlog, JoomGallery, phpbb3 and eventlist (mainly) and we can find plugins for all of these.

A quick search in here showed me, that neither JoomGallery, Eventlist or Groupjive has been mentioned in here, which makes me worry that these components are not supported?

Problem #1 to us is the lack of support for SH404 - if you look at their forum, 8 out of 10 questions never get answered and the programmer often writes "I don''t give support".

So................ I would like to have your perspective on this - I find that SefAdvance is the best and best supported component by the programmer but also that (last time I looked) other programmers are supporting their components by doing SHS404/Artio plugins and not SefAdvance.

Can you please tell me your thoughts about this?

Also, if we do go back to SefAdvance, what would be the best way of not losing all our old links in Google etc? Would we then manually have to set up thousands of 301s in HTaccess?

The plugins for Artio/sh404sef that you mention are nothing else but plugins for SEF Advance. It was SEF Advance that established the standard for sef_ext.php files and they were later adopted by other SEF components. So it is the same format, the plugin for sh404sef should work in SEF Advance and the other way around. Of course, there can be some differences and, if developer is not willing to help, I can of course offer some help.

Wow! You need to write that all over your site, Eric!

As I wrote, I've been using Joomla professionally since 5 years (from Mambo) and I didn't know

Also, SEF Advance supports router.php files for Joomla 1.5 native SEF which is what most developers will use in future.

As for the migration, most URLs should remain the same, if the content structure and settings are kept same. You should only need to add redirects to those links that change by some reason.

Ok! Thanks

I thought you were talking about migration from Joomla core-SEF to SEF Advance.

Anyway, you have an option in SEF Advance to remove sections and categories from URLs and you can turn off unique URL feature so you don't get unique ID too.

Well you can't change URL settings and then expect SEF Advance to automatically redirect all URLs somehow magically.

Can't be dome, sorry. You have to think about the SEF component and settings you want from the day one.

Well, this one can't be used. I haven't realised they made a new plugin format.
However, if you find sef_ext.php files they should work on SEF Advance.