Do I need a menu item with alias for all sef urls in Joomla?

1
votes

I'm new to Joomla so my comprehension of how it all works is a bit incomplete. I'd just like to know whether or not I need to add new menu items with an alias for all short urls used in the application (e.g. http://mysite/shorturl). What bothers me is that:

  1. Why would I need to make a menu item for an alias if I don't use the item in a menu (why such a relationship between urls and menus).
  2. If I had 50 articles using short urls (aliases), would I have to make a menu item for every single short url? There's some dependencies I don't like about that.

I thought it made sense to set the alias on an article level.

I read something about having to purchase an extension sh404-something for this - really?

If someone could help me out it would be much appriciated.

Thanks and regards, Kjetil

1
urljoomlajoomla-sef-urlssefjoomla1.7
I'm really confused by your question. So SEF URL's aren't enough? You want to have further short urls? In Joomla, menu-items can be used to display articles, all the articles in a category (blog style) (these are the 2 most useful ones) and do a bunch of different sort of listing. A menu item is not more than creating a link to a page. All articles and menu items must have aliases and you're right that these make up part of the SEF url. – Ali
btw, my personal website is on Joomla, I'd love to help but I just have a hard time understanding your question. – Ali
I'm just having a hard time grasping the concept of menu item = url. Normally if I had a category containing articles I'd expect an option where I could generate a menu with all the articles (if I had to code it myself then no problem), in Joomla it seems I have to make the menu manually AND attach articles to the menu. So everytime I make a new article I have to add a new menu item. Is this correct? – kjetilh
Note: with disabled SEF urls then generating the menu i mentioned earlier would probably be possible, but when SEF urls are enabled - even if I use the matching article alias it won't work (of course not) because you need a menu item to "create" a short url – kjetilh
Each article has its own unique url, even it's own unique SEF url. The only reason for have the menu item there is because there has to be a way to locally group and link things. Try this, create a category called "Things Starting with A" then create 3 articles and put them in that category. Create a menu item with a blog layout assigned to the category "Things Starting with A". When you click the menu item you should see your 3 articles, when you click their title you should see them on a single page with their own URL. – Ali

1 Answers

0
votes

Each article has its own unique url, even it's own unique SEF url. The only reason for have the menu item there is because there has to be a way to locally group and link things. Try this, create a category called "Things Starting with A" then create 3 articles and put them in that category. Create a menu item with a blog layout assigned to the category "Things Starting with A". When you click the menu item you should see your 3 articles, when you click their title you should see them on a single page with their own URL.