Since this tip might come in handy for many others out there, I decided to write this little tutorial in English. Since I am not a native speaker, I apologize for my poor language. If you have any questions to this tutorial, feel free to add a comment. I’ll reply back!
So you are using VirtueMart on Joomla and you are using the SEF-extension sh404SEF? It is said to be the best SEF-Tool for VirtueMart. I can’t judge that, since I haven’t tried other plugins for this use-case. But this plugin is to some extend a little tricky. Especially, as I found out, when you are using the virtuemart-category-IDs on URLs.
The problem
First of all: What is this all about?
Basically, the SEF-Tool switches nasty url-strings like index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=7&category_id=205&flypage=flypage.tpl&lang=de&page=shop.product_details&product_id=3024 to nicer ones, which read like: my_shop_category/product_sku/product_name.html Search engines like that kind of URLs better that those unreadable gibberish strings.
If you are using sub-categories on virtuemart, you might think about adding the IDs to the URLs. You would do that, if you had sub-categories with identical name under different parent-categories. Sub-cCategory-URLs including their IDs help search engines to know, that those are different. But: sh404SEF has the little bug (or is it a feature?), that if you activate using IDs in category-URLs, it also adds them to the page title, which is not that useful.
To deactivate the category-IDs from the page title, you’ll have to hack a PHP-File. It sounds hardy, but it isn’t.
Remove the category ID from the page title
- Use your familiar FTP-application, connect to your VirtueMart store and go to the folder
/components/com_sh404sef/meta_ext - Here you will find a file called “com_virtuemart.php“. Open that file in an editor.
- Look for the first function that is declared in this file. It begins with
function vm_sef_get_category_title( &$db, &$catDesc, $category_id, $option, $shLangName ){
- Later on in this function, around line 81, you’ll find this declaration of the page title:
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$title=''; do { // all categories and subcategories $title .= ( $sefConfig->shInsertCategoryId ? $tree[ $category_id ]->category_id.$sefConfig->replacement : '') .$tree[ $category_id ]->category_name. ' | '; $category_id = $tree [ $category_id ]->category_parent_id; } while( $category_id != 0 ); return rtrim( $title, ' | ');
- You will have to change the first set of definition to the page title. Change the lines
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$title .= ( $sefConfig->shInsertCategoryId ? $tree[ $category_id ]->category_id.$sefConfig->replacement : '') .$tree[ $category_id ]->category_name. ' | ';
to
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$title .= /* ( $sefConfig->shInsertCategoryId ? .$tree[ $category_id ]->category_id.$sefConfig->replacement : '') */ $tree[ $category_id ]->category_name. ' | ';
That means that you comment out (“/* comment here */”) using the category id in your page title. You could also delete this, but I prefer leaving such reductions in the original PHP-file for later reference.
- Be sure to remove the “.” before the second $tree-variable, otherwise you shop won’t work. an return a PHP-error.
- Save that file and re-upload it to its destination folder.
Done! You dont’t even need to purge your SEF-URLs.