SEF Advance 5.0 released

Another step stone has been reached in evolution of the most mature URL solution for Joomla! / Mambo CMS: SEF Advance 5.0 has been released! This exciting new version introduces several useful features and, more importantly, contains many, often requested, fixes and enhancements.

What's new in SEF Advance 5.0?

• Changed defaults to lower case, dashes instead of underscores
  Following advice of various SEO experts, we acknowledge this setting to be the most effective for search engines by setting it for defaults.
• Changed separator for URL encode exceptions from comma (,) to pipe (|)
  It was often requested that commas (,) are excepted from URL encode. This was not possible because commas were used as character separators. Now the separator is changed to pipe (|) so the comma can be added for exception of URL encode.
• Enabled for empty alias for setting the homepage URL
  When having some page other than the frontpage component for homepage, you can now enter an empty alias for that page to get a clean homepage URL.
• Enabled SEF for registration component
  Even if not playing important role for search engines, some will still appreciate clean URLs for registration pages which are now produced.
• Added IP restricted debug
  When debugging your website you will be able to enter your IP in configurations so only you will be able to see the debug information while other visitors can surf without disturbance.
• Added support for appended query string
  Sometimes appending a query string to your SEF URL is required by some services such as Google statistics (Example: domain.com/path/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC ). SEF Advance can handle those now.
• Added feature to turn SEF Advance off, letting the built-in SEF run
  Now you can turn on and off SEF Advance right from its configuration panel. Turning it off will leave built-in SEF working just like before installing SEF Advance.
• Changed admin version check and RSS reader to asynchronous system
  Checking the latest version and fetching the latest news from our site is working asynchronously now. This means that there will be no delay when loading the admin pages. The configuration will load as usually while data is fetched in the background and displayed when ready, in about a second or two. And guess what, the news are cached locally too so the next time you open configurations it will not have to open external connection again.
• Made RSS reader scrollable
  The latest news from our site are displayed with both titles and intros and you can scroll them.
• Switched from internal to ionCube licensing system
  This is internal system change which should not make any difference to end-user, but if there would be any licensing problems due to this change please contact us.
• Added ionCube version check on admin Diagnostics page
  Diagnostics page will now tell you the version of your ionCube Loader.
• Switched from internal to ionCube adapted license check, added trial version expiration check
  About page in configurations will now tell you more info about your license. If running a trial version it will display the expiration date.
• Various optimizations
  There are different slight optimizations in code.
• Help files revision
  Help files have been revised to reflect new features and changes.

Again, the upgrade is free for all existing customers, even though this is a whole point version increase!

Current customers can use the automatic download page to update for free.

New customers can order SEF Advance here: BUY NOW !

Upgrade instructions

As always, the simplest way to upgrade is to uninstall the old version and install the new one through the component installer. Note that this will delete your settings and aliases! To upgrade keeping your settings read on.

NOTE: These upgrade instructions only apply when upgrading from version 4.9. To upgrade from previous versions, first upgrade to 4.9 and then proceed with this upgrade.

• Upload and replace all SEF Advance files on your site using FTP.
• Execute following commands on your mySQL database (you can use phpMyAdmin):
  ALTER TABLE jos_sef_config ADD `registration` varchar(50) NOT NULL default 'registration' AFTER `login`;
  ALTER TABLE jos_sef_config ADD `debugip` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '' AFTER `debug`;
  ALTER TABLE jos_sef_config ADD `enabled` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '1' AFTER `custom_comp`;
• Alter your Replace exceptions settings by changing comma separator (,) to pipe separator (|).