SEF 1.5 to 3.x migration

I have an old J1.5 site with SEF Advance 2.4.6 that has over 13,500 pages many over 10 years old with a ton of backlinks and authority.

The site is configured as:

- Section and Category names are in the URL with uppercase and lowercase:  http:// .com/Section_Name/Category_Name/

- The config has "Unique Item" set to yes - appends the date the document was created along with the ItemID:  ...Document-Title-MMDDYYYYITEMID/

The document url allows:
* upper and lower case letters
* special characters to be included such as !^&*().'";: 
* ends with a backslash /
* replaces spaces with an underscore "_"


I'm migrating this to J3.x and would like to maintain the URL structure on as many pages as possible.  I'm using SP Upgrade to move the content over so the underlying J information will remain the same.  I realize that I'm going to miss a few URLs but I want to keep the 301's to a minimum if possible.

The issues that I've identified are:


1. J3 does not have sections.
2. the Alias' are lower case and use dashes "-" to replace spaces.
3. Can the current SEF Adv append CREATIONDATE|ITEMID to the URL?
4. Not sure how SEF Advance will react to special characters in the URL.


#1) Can I use a menu link to simulate the Section Name?  ie., create a menu link for each Section Name.
#2) Does Sef Advance for J3 override the alias' in Category and document alias fields?
#3) Can the current version of SEF Advance do this?
#4) Can I include special characters in the URL?
#5) For those URLs that are not supported can SEF Adv do a 301 redirect based on the ITEMID?


If SEF Advance doesn't solve these can someone make recommendations?

Thanks,


-jay

Hey Emir,

Hate to be a pest. 

Any suggestions on what to do?

Thanks,

-jay

SEF Advance will create URLs from the category structure. There are no sections but you can create two levels of categories and achieve the same thing. Because SEF Advance for Joomla 2.5/3 uses aliases and not category names just make sure that category aliases are the same as you want in the URL.

Yes, you can still append the unique ID (MMDDYYYYITEMID). You can't have redirects based on anything generic, you will need to create manual redirects for each URL you need.

Hey Emir,

Having problems getting this to work on a test installation:

1. Purchased and installed SEF Advanced for J3.
2. Migrated legacy J1.5 sections, categories and artciles to a test installation.
    a. converted the Section/Categories to Cat1/Cat2 to simulate the J1.5 structure.

3. Disabled SEF Advance and tested it with SEF urls disabled (no) - worked fine.
4. Enabled SEF Advance and set SEF urls to yes and all links are generating 404 errors.
  a.  I changed the SEF Advance config options one at a time hoping the problem was with the setting
 

Observations (besides the 404 errors):
- all urls are lower case - I used phpmyadmin to change the alias to @Proper case (Local_Government_News) and the URL is generated with lowercase.
- special characters are redacted - ,()[]"



Screenshots:

SEF Advance config: www.dropbox.com/s/88gudvf1ejgbb5h/sef-config.png?dl=0

Categories: www.dropbox.com/s/y14w2kbwi4xacyn/catego...-screenshot.png?dl=0

Article: www.dropbox.com/s/3wbcdzrhhbv5za5/article.jpg?dl=0


Legacy URL:
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New URL with SEF Enabled:(notice the @Proper case in Local Government News)

New URL with SEF Advance:

Hey Emir,

Can I contract with you to help get this resolved?  My project is stalled until I can get past these issues.

I hate to abandon all the old indexed pages but will do so if there are no alternatives.

Thanks,

-jay

We went through something similar about two years ago (Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5), maybe this helps:
The issues that I've identified are:
1.  J3 does not have sections.
Not a big deal, you're just going to use category/category
2.  the Alias' are lower case and use dashes "-" to replace spaces.
In Joomla 2.5 the core will not allow upper case in Alias.  I believe there are some hacks to stop this behavior, but we decided to go with a lower case convention (more on this later).
3.  Can the current SEF Adv append CREATIONDATE|ITE
MID to the URL?
Not sure why you'd want to do this..
4.  Not sure how SEF Advance will react to special characters in the URL.
Emir can answer.
#1)  Can I use a menu link to simulate the Section Name?  ie., create a menu link for each Section Name.
You can nest categories... the old term section is really just replaced with category.
#2)  Does Sef Advance for J3 override the alias' in Category and document alias fields?
It will use the alias assigned to each category. You'll want to verify...
#3) Can the current version of SEF Advance do this?
See #2
#4) Can I include special characters in the URL?
Yes... but we avoid using them.
#5) For those URLs that are not supported can SEF Adv do a 301 redirect based on the ITEMID?
More insights...
The convention at Joomla and SEO now avoids mixed case.  We had a structure in Joomla 1.5 as:

sitename.com/Section-Name/Category-Name/Web-Page-Name/
This causes a lot of confusion because this page (below) among countless others... would point to the same page and create the potential for duplicate content:
sitename.com/section-name/category-name/web-page-name/

We decided to stop fighting the move to lowercase and break our convention.  We didn't want to fight with Alias, we wanted to avoid duplicate content... our solution was to use apache lc to force lower case on all URIs and tell search engines everything is lower case via a 301.
In our httpd.conf we inserted:
In our .htaccess, we 301'd everthing this way:YMMV, hope this helps.