Pretty URL - (NOT FRIENDLY) ?

[Erik]

Dear PrestaShop users!

We're trying to enable full URL rewrite, when there is a Friendly URL ON in PS preferences..there is still showing
domain_name.com/shop/10-product_name.html instead of domain_name.com/product
When trying to sign up for a new account from front page there is not showing pretty URL it shows
shop/authentication.php?back=order.php?step=1
Or when on contact us page domain_name/shop/contact-form.php is it possible or will it be possible in future to change it to be real Friendly URL?

example: domain_name.com/what_ever_user_wants

Erik

[Thomas]

Hi Eric,

Did you do the right things with your .htaccess file? My URLs are fine and not like yours at all. Also you should be able to do some .htaccess magic and fix those problems if they are there. Below is a good link to some knowledge about them if it interests you.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

[delite163]

Hi,
I am new to PrestaShop and really like the look and feel of the shop. I am having a couple of problems.
1. The friendly urls is enabled and I changed the htaccess.txt to .htaccess so now I should have friendly urls. But I don't have that. This is what I have http://www.ohyesvintagejewelry.com/jewelry/10-turquoise-ring.html. What do I need to do to get this right?

2. I am using US dollar sign where do I change the euro configuration 46,00 to $46.00?

I hope that i have posted in the right area.

Thanks
delite

[Thomas]

For number two, if you are asking what I think, you want to go to the admin back end and click on payments and then at the top there is a second row so you want to click on currencies there. The rest is pretty straight forward.

For number one, are you sure that your server supports mod_rewrite?

[delite163]

Hi Thomas,
thanks for the help. I figured out the currancy problem and checked with my server and I have mod_rewrite enabled by default. Do you and anyone else have any ideas?
Thanks
delite

[Thomas]

The only thing that pops into my head this late at night would be file permissions for the .htaccess file.

[delite163]

Hi Thomas,
The permissions are set at 644. Was there anything that I needed to edit in the .htaccess file?
thank you

[Thomas]

You could try a couple of things. You could type some gibberish into the top of the .htaccess and see if you get server errors, quick way to check if .htaccess is being read. Also make sure that there are not .htaccess files above it in the directory structure. If you put gibberish in there and everything loads right then it is not being read at all and that could be your host not allowing them or that another one is overriding it.

Let me know if that helps

Thanks
Thomas

[delite163]

the site that I am changing over to PrestaShop is an active html site and does have a .htaccess file but I have installed the shop in a file by itself. Would that make a difference?

I also have 4 subdomains that are in their own folder with .htaccess files.

[Thomas]

It can make a difference. Also you can add

RewriteBase /shop/

directly beneath RewriteEngine on where "shop" is the directory your presta is in and that might help. If you can't get it figured out then you can PM and we can talk some more and I would be glad to take a look at it for you if you are comfortable giving me shell access or we can just keep troubleshooting.

[delite163]

Hi Thomas,
Sorry for the delay. I reinstalled the cart and still get the unfriendly url. I contacted my hosting and I am supposed to have all the requirements for this cart.

on the RewriteBase/Shop is that folders that I need to create?

I took a look at your site and it's impressive ;0)

[Thomas]

Thanks for the compliment! For instance if you installed presta in directory called presta underneath httpdocs then you would set your rewrite base to that folder, like this. RewriteBase /presta/ if it was installed in a directory called shop then it would be RewriteBase /shop/ it basically just lets the .htaccess know when it does it's rewrites to do so from that base directory.

If you have .htaccess files on the other apps you are running and they work then your hosting should be fine and it is probably just some conflict. I would probably just type that gibberish first and see if you get a server error. If you do then it is reading it and then .htaccess just needs some adjustment if it doesn't throw an error then it is ignoring your .htaccess or can't read it.

Let me know how it goes. Sorry took me a minute to reply had a busy couple of days

Thanks
Tom

[delite163]

Hi,
I am confused. I have presta installed on a linux server have the shop in a folder called jewelry. I don't understand where I find the rewrite base. Where would I write the gibberish?
Thank you
delite

[ejectcore]

Please send me a PM with your FTP details & I will take a quick look.
if you can send with in the next 10-15mins then my responce will be straight away ;-)

[ejectcore]

I have just had quick look at your site & it seems you have SEF URL's working.
in fact they have worked all the time, Prestashop currently shows the product ID within the URL.
although this search engine friendly I personnely don't like this, but I think there has been a addtional module someone in this community has created which can be found here. http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/2451/

[delite163]

Hi Amwdesign,
Sorry for the delay. I downloaded the module. got it installed but it is in French and I am not bi lingual. Is there an english version?
Thanks so much\
delite

[ejectcore]

I will look into this later this week, have a few of my own issues to deal with first.

[GUNSO]

I have the same problem on my server (http://jqskart.com). I only get links like this: http://jqskart.com/8-armbond
if i turn on the friendly URL feature.

[delite163]

Hi I was hoping that your reply would be the one that helped me get the unfriendly url fixed but I guess not. I had the moderator alpha media contact me for my ftp settings. I pm'd them to them and never heard back. Oh well I uninstalled the PRESTAsHOP due to lack of TECH SUPPORT.

[ejectcore]

apologies I have not had chance to look into this.
But please be patient & I will take a look.

sorry I wasn't ignoring you just very busy here.
What exactly do you require :question:

I have not yet received a PM from you :wow:

[Peter Wilson]

delite163

How much money did you lose to this "lack of TECH SUPPORT"? Exactly -- none.

amwdesign is a volunteer PrestaShop moderator who has helped many dozens of users throughout this Forum at no cost to anyone. He is the very model of an open-source community member, one who uses a free open-source software and then "gives back" to help it grow and be the best it can be.

To use PrestaShop, the only price you have to pay is courtesy, some patience, and a little consideration.

If that is asking too much, please purchase a commercial e-Commerce solution and sign up for one of their service plans. You may find that better suited to your needs.

[junnecito]

delite163:
When I get some time I will try to translate this module for you. ;-)

[ejectcore]

Thank you Peter for your kind words. :cheese:
Just to add to what Peter is saying I do volunteer in my own time to help out people to solve there Prestashop problems.
however if we are talking a huge amount of development time there may be a small charge for my service.

For example if someone requests a module if this is something which can be done under one hour quickly & smoothly I will try to donate my time to the Prestashop community. however if these are requests which takes several hours or possibly even several days in development time. usually there is a small hourly charge for my service but the end result is shared with the rest of the community FREE so in-fact it is the prestashop client also donating to the community.
Which you will see on most of my modules ;-)

I also provide a service after the module has been released to the public. donating my time for the additional support to bring out different versions of my mods to this community.

I'm sure many developer's here are in the same boat. At the end of the day nobody can really expect to work for nothing although I will donate my time when I am free from my own day to day web projects

[junnecito]

Hi Peter, Hi Adam:
+1 for boht of you ;-)
People what to have every thing for free ;-P
Did they do job's to there clients for free :question:
I realy don't think so.
Just to say, thank prestateam for this wonderfull job, & thanks Adam for helping us. ;-P

[delite163]

"

delite163

How much money did you lose to this “lack of TECH SUPPORT”? Exactly — none.

amwdesign is a volunteer PrestaShop moderator who has helped many dozens of users throughout this Forum at no cost to anyone. He is the very model of an open-source community member, one who uses a free open-source software and then “gives back” to help it grow and be the best it can be.

To use PrestaShop, the only price you have to pay is courtesy, some patience, and a little consideration.

If that is asking too much, please purchase a commercial e-Commerce solution and sign up for one of their service plans. You may find that better suited to your needs."

I was not being discourteous.

I do understand that the cart is free.

and I do understand about volunteer work.

But my time is important too. Money was not the issue. I just left up in the air about the problem I was Having. I did pm Alpha Media that very same day with in minutes of talking to them. I had no way of knowing that they didn't get the pm. That was on the 14th of July. It is now the 24th of july. So the cart is free and a very good looking cart it is, but if the support in't there when you need it.....then what's your point? I base my donation on how everything works. That includes support.

Thanks

[ejectcore]

Lets try again
PM & fully describe your issue including FTP/Backoffice details & I will see if I can help you.
if I am able to find a correct solution to your issue I will then post a message in this topic as well as a follow up PM
Speak Soon ;-)

[delite163]

Hi Alpha,
Thanks for being fair. Right now the cart is uninstalled as per my post. I will try to get it installed and get back to you.
:-)

[junnecito]

Hi adam:
Did you translate the rewriing+ :question: ;-)

[Tine Chem]

I have the same problem on my server (http://jqskart.com). I only get links like this: http://jqskart.com/8-armbond
if i turn on the friendly URL feature.

Hi I am still having problem with this issue. Did someone solved it? What do I have to do to get rid of id number in front of friendly url.

thanks for your help.

[JG Machine]

Just wanted to also ask and see if anyone knows how to remove the id number at the beginning of friendly url's. Haven't found an answer myself yet...

Thanks!

[Wiz_KeeD]

I am also having problems with pretty urls, i have no ideea what does the .htaccess file need to contain for it to work adisplay the urs without the numbers in front, can anyone support some info on this problem please? apreciate it!

[Paul C]

While it's maybe not aesthetically ideal having id's in the "friendly" urls I can't see exactly why anyone would consider this a major "showstopper" of an issue. What exactly is the expectation regarding the amount of "improvement" that would be gained with these removed?

You will not be able to "solve" this issue by making changes to the .htaccess file.

Paul

[Wiz_KeeD]

The main ideea would be that when you browse a product it will look like www.site.com/category/product-whatever.html and when you browse the category it would be like www.site.com/09-category.While this is pretty aesthetical it's also a SEO and navigation no-no, most people would imagine (i would too) that if you delete the product from the url and leave /category/ it would show you the cat, not the error page, and also when indexing urls it would be far better to have just category except 0342-category.I have also read somewhere that having url's that direct to 404 pages when eliminating a pieace is not a very good practice, so for the sake of all these motivations + my stubborn will to have them without the id's in front, can we have some help on this please?

Also Paul here

[Paul C]

OK. I see the argument about the category and removing the product resulting in a 404 being bad. To me the solution would then be to fix it by having the store produce:

http://www.example.com/09-category/40285-product-whatever.html

I know some people object to having the numbers in there, but to me they're a compromise worth making, and I see the above as something that could be implemented without too much trouble.

The main reason for keeping those ids in there is performance. Using something that "mostly" works ok on, say, Wordpress (and I say mostly as I've seen some WP sites that perform like dogs because of their ultra-friendly urls) doesn't necessarily scale well to a store with 1,000s or 10,000s of products. The human-friendly argument also mainly doesn't hold up too well; I've seen the urls that these schemes produce and there's no way any human is going to remember (or even bother to write down) something like:

http://www.example.com/articles/thoughts-on-writing-a-new-seo-article-that-will-confuse.html

Where the human friendly effect does come in is where you see familiar, relevant words in the url in search results- and that's achieved even if there are numbers in there too. In terms of the "SEO benefit" of not having numbers in there - there isn't any. In fact I would go as far as to propose that there's very little direct SEO advantage in having these so-called SEO urls at all- except - Where you can gain from using them is when people link to you without using any anchor text (or using the url as the anchor text) - in these cases having your keywords in the url is very effective as it guarantees relevant anchor text....

Thoughts?

Paul

[Wiz_KeeD]

You do have a point but my first argument still stands, it's pretty unpractical from any point of view, whether it's SEO, user-friendly or logical. When having www.site.com/cat/products-that-might-be-a-little-long-and-serves-no-user-purpose, having www.site.com/cat/ return a 404 and needing to use 01-cat and such is not a very practical. From a seo point of view having they keyword inside the url even if it is /idnr-seoword is not as good as /seoword directly, but point taken, might not be such a huge relevance but in the end it does help a little, the question being "is the speed compromise worth for the small maybe minuscule seo boost + friendly and common sence navigation?"

Paul

[Paul C]

I think performance wins over removing those numbers, for sure.

I see quite a few people sweating about what would be a pretty marginal benefit. I do appreciate the point you made about removing a segment of the url and the result being counter-intuitive, but then the more I think about it I start to wonder what would drive an end-user to do such a thing... and I arrive at poorly designed navigation on the site; based on little more than the theory that clicking a button is easier.... Search engines won't do it, they're far too intelligent.

I also think that web developers and those with interests in SEM tend to have an unhealthy tendency to obsess about minutiae. Matt Cutts once commented on people having BO - backlink obsession; and you can see where he was coming from. Many small businesses would be better spending their time marketing themselves in other ways. I've seen many more sites owned by the "scientific analyst" fail than I have sites run by the blissfully ignorant - given equal amounts of time, determination and enthusiasm. I think there's a lesson in there

Good discussion though, and I am always open to new ideas and opinions, which is why I asked the question

If I was feeling in a devilish mood I would make the comment at this point that using the keywords as the filenames for product images is said to have a positive effect on keyword ranking (SEOMoz has it not far off being equal in weight to having keywords in the url). Does anyone fancy putting in a feature request for this and starting a petition?

Paul

[chup]

OK. I see the argument about the category and removing the product resulting in a 404 being bad. To me the solution would then be to fix it by having the store produce:

http://www.example.com/09-category/40285-product-whatever.html

how is it possible so? with some hack to the core file?

[Paul C]

In 1.3.x it would be a complete hack affecting both the .htaccess file and the various places in the cart where the "friendly" urls are formed. In 1.4.x it would likely be much cleaner to do. It may even be, dare I say it, relatively easy in 1.4.x, depending on how strictly the Link.php class is now being used to form the friendly urls ...

Paul

[chup]

cool, will be following again on this once 1.4 is finalize

[Wiz_KeeD]

Upon further investigation i have managed to extract the category id and later on all the data required by using JUST the name, therefore you can use www.site.com/product-category/ and it shall retreive all the data without the id, and it's all of the cost of one query (which in my opinion isn't such a drawback), but after that, the problem comes into play, how does it know if that's a category name or for say a manufacturer?In the present format id-name (- means category) id_name (_ means manufacturer).While the first part wasn't such a big deal, searching through all the categories manufacturers and other parent-like subjects would be really impractical not to mention the fact that you are allowed to have manufacturers and categories with the same name, so that's a no-no.The solution i had in mind was to implement a /cateogory/name and /manufacturer/name to distinguish between the two, but that's taking a bigger commitment, and while it might not be that hard to implement, don't know if it's worth the trouble

[Paul C]

Yes, this is the problem. Another issue you have to be careful about when you remove those numbers is that you could potentially be creating duplicates... The ids actually also serve to keep these little guys unique

For 1.4 I have a thought in mind of how it could be done exactly the way you would like it - however - I was coming to the conclusion that you would need to make a huge number of changes in a huge number of places to identify and prompt attention to duplicate urls on the admin entry forms - and in some cases you'd have no option but to use an id to force them unique (e.g. in import scripts where you encounter a clash).

The other design issue would be whether or not to also remove any additional parameters at the same time e.g.

http://www.example.com/shoes/page/1/sort/price/ascending

Which makes the process of identify exactly what the url refers to a lot more complicated. (In this case is "page" a subcategory of shoes or is it a pagination parameter?) It can get "pretty" silly "pretty" quickly - and remember these might be required to be in 5 different languages (and you need to detect the language) plus you'd likely want to keep a redirect chain for when you change the url so you can 301 outdated ones to the new ones......

Paul

[dixido]

The main ideea would be that when you browse a product it will look like www.site.com/category/product-whatever.html and when you browse the category it would be like www.site.com/09-category.While this is pretty aesthetical it's also a SEO and navigation no-no, most people would imagine (i would too) that if you delete the product from the url and leave /category/ it would show you the cat, not the error page, and also when indexing urls it would be far better to have just category except 0342-category.I have also read somewhere that having url's that direct to 404 pages when eliminating a pieace is not a very good practice, so for the sake of all these motivations + my stubborn will to have them without the id's in front, can we have some help on this please?

Also Paul here

I definitely agree on this. I don't have very much against these ID numbers in the URLs but it simply can not be a good SEO practice to have error 404 pages when removing pieces of a URL.

Optimal: /category -> /category/product
Close to optimal: /11-category -> /11-category/12-product
Bad: /11-category -> /category/12-product

Why not make this ID-thingie a checkbox feature under bo prefrences? "Do you have > 10k products and need help keeping every URL unique?"


E

[Paul C]

Having thought about it further I've changed my mind on having the category ID in there just to fix one small case (someone taking the time to manually manipulate the urls). Why? Sitelinks for one - if you have "proper" category names then this gives Google the opportunity to automatically generate them with sensible values. I now think it would make the issue worse rather than better - sacrificing one (little used) user interface issue with another much greater one.

There are many examples of sites where removing portions of a url can cause "unexpected" behaviour. I think a better (more generic) approach would be to handle such situations within the context of the 404 page/controller, rather than tampering elsewhere.

Paul