Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Using ARTIO JoomSEF

While the Joomla! core SEF functionality is already good enough for most shops, sometimes developers opt for third party SEF solutions. ARTIO JoomSEF functions fine with MageBridge, but you need to configure its settings for optimal use with MageBridge. This tutorial guides you through the steps.

The special thing of MageBridge SEF

MageBridge brings Magento content to Joomla!, but also integrates the Magento SEO-information into the Joomla! header. Regarding SEF URLs, this means that every Magento URL is integrated into Joomla! using SEF - so instead of only working with Joomla! SEF, you will also be working with Magento SEF. Because this requires some work, the MageBridge code assumes that the Joomla! core SEF is used to base this functionality upon.

You can still use third party SEF-solutions, providing that these solutions offer backward compatibility with the Joomla! core SEF. So does ARTIO JoomSEF, but you still need to configure this.

Set the MageBridge handling in ARTIO JoomSEF

To make sure ARTIO JoomSEF does not mess with the Magento SEF URLs, you need to disable the JoomSEF handler for MageBridge URLs. To do this, browse to Manage Extensions within the JoomSEF configuration panel. On this page select the extension MageBridge. This will open up a new page.

Within the settings specific for MageBridge, set the Handling to be the Default Joomla! router. This will make sure JoomSEF will work fine, but specifically for MageBridge URLs the original Joomla! core SEF will be used.

Tip: Redirect Joomla! SEO to JoomSEF

One setting that most likely needs to be turned off is Redirect Joomla! SEO to JoomSEF (under the Advanced section). The purpose of the configuration above is that JoomSEF doesn't supply MageBridge URLs, so therefor the core Joomla! SEO needs to be instead. Perhaps this setting Redirect Joomla! SEO to JoomSEF should automatically understand this, but in some cases it does not. Set this setting to No.

Tip: Setting base href value

One MageBridge customer bumped into the problem that the Magento theme referred to the URL # to apply certain JavaScript effects:

<a href="#" ....

With JoomSEF this caused an issue when the base href tag was set to the base URL of the site, and not the current URL:

<base href="http://JOOMLA/" />

By modifying the JoomSEF configuration this problem was solved: The parameter Set page base href value was set to Yes - always use full SEO URL.

Tip: Strange URL redirects

If the instructions above do not work, it might be related to a difference in how PHP-code is interpreted. There seems to be a pending bug in JoomSEF where a PHP comparison works in one PHP environment, but behaves unexpectedly in another. While other Joomla! extensions do not object, because of the settings of MageBridge (listed on this page), MageBridge shops might give problems here. We have posted a fix for this problem on the JoomSEF forum:

http://www.artio.net/support-forums/joomsef/joomsef-free-edition/bug-in-joomsef-php-plus-fix

Tip: Using MageBridge Remote Single Sign On

In 99% of all use-cases, the MageBridge option Remote Single Sign On should be disabled. The core already ships with a local Single Sign On (when Magento is wrapped inside Joomla!). However, if you choose to not use the MageBridge component for serving content, but use the standalone Magento frontend instead, Remote Single Sign On is probably needed.

When using Remote Single Sign On with JoomSEF, you will need to configure two specific options for the MageBridge component: First of all, you will need to set the option Custom non-SEF variables to be as follows:

hash;request

Also, you need to configure the option Do not SEF URLs matching regular expression to be:

task=login

Without this, the MageBridge Remote Single Sign On will redirect you to the MageBridge homepage with unwanted URL-variables.