We have been long standing users of OpenSEF to create joomla search engine friendly urls, mainly because when we first started fooling around with SEF urls it was the best component out there - some would say SEF Advanced from Sakic was better but it certainly wasn't $40s better!

Over the past year or so OpenSEF hasn't been updated and it's now clear that it's abandonware. This left us in a sticky situation as we, and many others, needed a replacement.

After a great deal of research it was obvious that the only two contenders were JoomSEF from Artio and sh404SEF from Yannick at extensions.siliana.net. Looking into the two components further sealed the deal - sh404SEF is far superior, the sheer amount of features and plugins for it are unbelievable. We'll save the details for a later blog post dedicated to sh404SEF, it's worth it.

Having chosen the successor to OpenSEF the real work now started - we had to test and configure the new urls to ensure they were the same as the old OpenSEF ones on our largest site. This was of paramount importance to ensure that all the PR and links we had build up weren't thrown away in the switch.

Content was fine and it handled iJoomla components far better. The only problem was Mosets Tree, the most annoying this was that it was a minor problem causing major headaches! The old MTree urls were of the style:

http://mysite.com/dir-name/listing-name/visit/

Whilst the new urls were:

http://mysite.com/dir-name/listing-name/visit.html

Where "visit" can be replaced with "details", "recommend" etc etc.

We had anticipated using custom redirects to overcome this problem but soon realised that this wouldn't work as they would only go from internal joomla urls to SEF urls - not from old SEF urls to new SEF urls.

The answer was to read a great .htaccess tutorial and devise some custom rules to cover the problematic urls for Mtree. Here is the result, all work prefectly:

########## Begin - Redirecting Old Mosets sef urls to new ones
#
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/details/ dir-name/$1/view-details.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/visit/ dir-name/$1/visit.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/review/ dir-name/$1/write-review.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/report/ dir-name/$1/report.html [l,r=301]
RewriteRule ^dir-name/(.+)/recommend/ dir-name/$1/recommend.html [l,r=301]
#
########## End - Redirecting Old Mosets sef urls to new ones

All you need to do is copy and paste the above code into the top of your .htaccess file and all incoming visitors to the old urls will be 301'd to the new ones - the 301 means your PR will go with it too!

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