Lets talk about the future

[Aaron Wood]

Responding to Nick's point,

    It is true, that the standard output of the Joomla "SEF" urls can be overridden if you have the necessary coding knowledge (I had to do this myself on the network of sites that I maintain), or if you want to take the time to make all those menu items.

    However, the point I was trying to make is that, for the survival of Joomla in a competitive market, you shouldn't have to. Many webmasters I know are turned off by this. If the goal is to try and make Joomla the premier CMS, then this needs to be an out-of-the-box features, and not have to rely on hacks and workarounds. Otherwise busy web designers will go to a CMS  that will do this, simply to save time (time = money, after all), and Joomla will be relegated to the status of a hobby CMS, great to play around with, not useful for serious business sites (I happen not to believe that, but it is becoming more of a common sentiment.) That is a fate I would hate to see happen to the CMS I love. I would personally love to contribute to fixing this in the core, but to be quite honest I do not feel my coding skills are quite up to snuff yet.

    We barely made it past the 1.5 to 1.6+(up to 2.5) migration fiasco, which only mollified people because of the new incorporated auto-update and smooth future migration features in the current version. (which may or may not become a problem with 3.0...)

    I would say that it's down to deciding exactly what the Joomla community want's this CMS to be or become. If we want it to be the top CMS, it needs to be stable, easy to use, and business-friendly. I believe the various working groups may not have been looking at it from a business perspective, though this is no fault of their own. However, I feel it's vitally important. I'm a businessman first (webmaster is only part of my job), and a part time coder second, so I tend to look at things from this point of view.

    Whether or not people agree with me in the end doesn't matter. I am just trying to give the community something to consider. And I would be happy to donate my time helping fix this problem, (or brainstorming others), and contribute in whatever manner I may. 

    I think that's the real spirit of Joomla, people helping people, coming together to build something that can be great.

 

Sincerely,
Aaron Wood, Creative Director
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

[Niels Braczek]

Am 14.04.2012 15:36, schrieb Aaron Wood:

> It is true, that the standard output of
> the Joomla "SEF" urls can be overridden if you have the necessary
> coding knowledge (I had to do this myself on the network of sites
> that I maintain), or if you want to take the time to make all those
> menu items. However, the point I was trying to make is that, for the
> survival of Joomla in a competitive market, you shouldn't have to.

Just yesterday, I found a hidden parameter: sef_advanced_link. It is
used in the routers of com_contact, com_content, com_newsfeeds, and
com_weblinks. If set to true (1), the ID is not added to the URL.
Currently, there seems to be no way to set this parameter from the
administration, but it is very simple to change the 8 occurrences of

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 0);

to

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 1);

I don't know, why this feature is not configurable.

HTH
Niels

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[Niels Braczek]

Am 14.04.2012 16:09, schrieb Niels Braczek:

> Just yesterday, I found a hidden parameter: sef_advanced_link. It is
> used in the routers of com_contact, com_content, com_newsfeeds, and
> com_weblinks. If set to true (1), the ID is not added to the URL.

I investigated it a lot more - unfortunately, the parsing of the URL
does not work properly, when the option is set to true.

> I don't know, why this feature is not configurable.

That might be the reason :(

Regards,

[Michael Babker]

In what ways does it fail? This actually was discussed for a short time
in the JBS Skype chat after your first e-mail about the subject, and we
were all slightly confused as well as to why it wasn't in use.

A couple people have noted that it works in simple environments, so maybe
with a couple of tweaks it will be good to use in larger environments?
That option got the attention of a few people, and it sounds like
something that we might want to make work sooner than later.

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[brian teeman]

I found that it worked IF there was a direct menu link to the category but did not work when there was not

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[Niels Braczek]

Am 14.04.2012 21:27, schrieb brian teeman:

> I found that it worked IF there was a direct menu link to the category but
> did not work when there was not

I can confirm that.

[elin]

It is not in use precisely because it was not proven to be reliable enough for massive use and  potentially creates huge problems for users who are not skilled enough to handle it (hence the advanced terminology). But back before we tested and discussed everything before commits, the code was put in without discussion but it was decided to leave it in so that advanced developers can take advantage of it and further work could be done. There was a somewhat intense debate about this in the pre 1.6 release year. 

Elin

On Saturday, April 14, 2012 3:41:15 PM UTC-4, Niels Braczek wrote:

Am 14.04.2012 21:27, schrieb brian teeman:

> I found that it worked IF there was a direct menu link to the category but
> did not work when there was not

I can confirm that.

Regards,
Niels

--

On Saturday, April 14, 2012 3:41:15 PM UTC-4, Niels Braczek wrote:

Am 14.04.2012 21:27, schrieb brian teeman:

> I found that it worked IF there was a direct menu link to the category but 

> did not work when there was not

I can confirm that.

Regards,

Niels

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[Aaron Wood]

I'm curious as to what ways it was unreliable. Could not it have been placed in Global Configuration as an option, perhaps with an explanatory tooltip as to when it would work and when it wouldn't?

    Even if it was put up as an "at your own risk" patch, plugin, or even piece of documentation, It would have been nice to know the possibility existed. Even if only for hobby developers who might want to work on solving it as a project.

    If it was(and I'm not saying it wasn't, the joomla.org site is large..), then I apologize. But I did search for any possible solution to this problem, and it was the first I've heard of it.

 

Sincerely,
Aaron Wood, Creative Director
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

---

From: elin <elin....@gmail.com>
To: joomla-...@googlegroups.com
Cc: nbra...@bsds.de
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 8:07 PM
Subject: Re: [jcms] Lets talk about the future

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[elin]

No you really don't put things like that in the UI. Who in the world would say no to the advanced settings?

Elin

On Monday, April 16, 2012 8:15:25 PM UTC-4, Aaron Wood wrote:

I'm curious as to what ways it was unreliable. Could not it have been placed in Global Configuration as an option, perhaps with an explanatory tooltip as to when it would work and when it wouldn't?

    Even if it was put up as an "at your own risk" patch, plugin, or even piece of documentation, It would have been nice to know the possibility existed. Even if only for hobby developers who might want to work on solving it as a project.

    If it was(and I'm not saying it wasn't, the joomla.org site is large..), then I apologize. But I did search for any possible solution to this problem, and it was the first I've heard of it.

 

Sincerely,
Aaron Wood, Creative Director
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

---

From: elin <elin....@gmail.com>
To: joomla-dev-cms@googlegroups.com

To post to this group, send an email to joomla-dev-cms@googlegroups.com.
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[brian teeman]

From my own testing of this on a site just last week I can say that I was initially super excited about it and it just worked but then I started to get all sorts of issues (specifically when an item does not have a direct link) 

In my opinion of training hundreds of users (new and experienced) they would all have used the option and then complained that their site was broken. The biggest problem is that unless you are "in the know" the issues you face are not immediately obvious to be the result of this setting.

[MaxOnTheHill]

Was the only occasion that there were issues with this when there was not a menu link to the main (top) category of content displayed?   ..... simple fix is (something to) auto-create a hidden menu item for each category when it is created.

Also, has anyone tried this with the new Joomla tags feature? ... would be very interested of whether this works also .... especially using the same technique as above "simple fix is (something to) auto-create a hidden menu item for each [tag] when it is created."

Look forward to any answers and discussion.

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:40:30 PM UTC+10, brian teeman wrote:

From my own testing of this on a site just last week I can say that I was initially super excited about it and it just worked but then I started to get all sorts of issues (specifically when an item does not have a direct link) 

In my opinion of training hundreds of users (new and experienced) they would all have used the option and then complained that their site was broken. The biggest problem is that unless you are "in the know" the issues you face are not immediately obvious to be the result of this setting.

On Tuesday, 17 April 2012 01:18:42 UTC+1, elin wrote:

No you really don't put things like that in the UI. Who in the world would say no to the advanced settings?

Elin

On Monday, April 16, 2012 8:15:25 PM UTC-4, Aaron Wood wrote:

I'm curious as to what ways it was unreliable. Could not it have been placed in Global Configuration as an option, perhaps with an explanatory tooltip as to when it would work and when it wouldn't?

    Even if it was put up as an "at your own risk" patch, plugin, or even piece of documentation, It would have been nice to know the possibility existed. Even if only for hobby developers who might want to work on solving it as a project.

    If it was(and I'm not saying it wasn't, the joomla.org site is large..), then I apologize. But I did search for any possible solution to this problem, and it was the first I've heard of it.

 

Sincerely,
Aaron Wood, Creative Director
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

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