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My last entry here was inspired by the possible use of sh404sef in the site we just launched (YAY!). We ultimately decided against using it for this site. Despite many great features that would make it a valuable addition to any site there were just too many issues I couldn't address in the time frame available before launch.

The initial motivating factor that made us  look into it was a need to handle "404  page not found errors". Joomla 1.5 (J!15) does have the ability to handle these, but the additional facility to handle sef urls and reporting on site activity related to hack attempts and failed page access attempts are really exciting.

Unfortunately, the sef urls require specially written  functions for any extensions in use on the site through a sef_ext file. On this site, we are using Virtuemart and Azrul's MyBlog, both of which are supported out of the box by sh404sef. rsGallery2, another extension we are using might be supported through an older sef_ext written for the J!10 version, but I didn't have a chance to pursue this. And from what I could tell on their forum, rsg2 isn't yet supported in J!15. Additionally, there are a couple extensions I wrote for this site in addition to JoomSuite, none of which are supported at all.

There is an option to - seemingly - get sh404sef entirely out of the way in these unsupported cases. I had hopes that this meant that sef urls would be created natively in J!15. Alas, this turned turned J!15 urls into J!10 style urls. So for our menu link to rsg2, the url '/photos' became something like '/components/com_rsgallery2'. I never found any way to have sh404sef enabled without losing the J!15 urls.

The authors suggested that I could just manually create a custom url to get around this. In this site, this would mean creating hundreds or even thousandsof custom urls. Needless to say, this was not an option. Also, it likely  meant that every time a new photo or new Joomsuite article was added to the site, the client would have to also create a new custom url. Not acceptable.

 So the only real solution would have been to create the necessary sef_ext files for about four or five components for which I also didn't have time.

I'm looking forward to using sh404sef in the future. It's a great looking extension that is largely well done and perfectly usable right now on smaller, less complex sites than the one we just launched.