Hi

I have a site running on www.vanisrael.be. The client organises an 'open house day' and I already created a menu-item and a form for this.

Now I should make the same pages as the homepage, but the address has to be www.vanisrael.be/kbc, www.vanisrael.be/prof and www.vanisrael.be/geburen. Because, depending on the type of client, they can subscribe to another program of the open house day. They will use these addresses in a commercial.

The webpages must not be displayed in the menu and can just be accessed by typing the address in your browser. And I have no idea of how to create these webpages..Can anyone help me? I've tried duplicating the homepage, but this didn't work..

Greetings
Stefanie

Hi Stefanie,

You would need to create a hidden menu and use that to create the url you need

You may need to create a new template style for those three pages - hiding the content area and then assigning to and the modules to the menu link

Cheers
Paul

Hi Paul

Thank you! I've managed to create another menu that is not showing on my webpage. So far so good.Now I need to have the URL set to www.vanisrael.be/klanten so they can see the form and sign in for the open house day. The current URL seems to be www.vanisrael.be/index.php?option=com_formmaker&view=formmaker&id=12.

I must be forgetting something or do something wrong, because I can't change the link in the menu-item. Can you help me out on this one? Once I know it once, I can do the same for the other pages..

Stefanie

What is the alias for the link?

cheers
Paul

"klanten", the same as the title

I'm thinking this a form component url - if you test with a standard article do you get a similar url?

Cheers
Paul

We have needed to do similar in the past with what is in effect "landing pages" for specific advertised url's.

For us the easiest way is to use a SEF component, we use sh404, to then handle the incoming url and send to the correct page, the url is then constructed how you wish. You can also track hits to these url. A word of caution though, sh404 is a complex application, so you would need some time to set it up. More importantly you would need to ensure any SEO traffic to existing url's is handled correctly to avoid messing up your search engine ranking if the site is well established. sh404 by default will apply tot he whole site, so treat with care unless this is a new site.

An alternative way, you could embed the form or place in a module, on a page of a standard article. One article page per url, as Paul suggests. You should then be able to handle the SEF and url construction more easily from core Joomla without the form component getting in the way.

Second way would be to handle at server level, redirect the url to the Joomla one, whatever that is.

Hope that helps and does not confuse too much!

Ian

Thanks again Ian

I'd personally go for using an article option rather than sh404sef we've seen users get a bit lost using it - as you say use it with caution as it is complex

Cheers
Paul

Let's not do complex

I've made an article, linked to the hidden menu but the url is still not what I want. The menu item is linked to the article and I've made a form module, published in a certain position.
The URL does not work and the form is not showing.
I have another template ('default', with module in position 'grid1') for this menu but no luck..
Hm..didn't think this would be so difficult!
Stefanie

Hi Stefanie,

I just did a quick test locally

It does work for me but I'm not using your form component

I created an article called zoo
Created a menu link with the alias zoo

created a module with testLoad as the position name
Assigned it to all page
Used loadposition in the article to load the position testLoad

then typed the alias into the browser which for me is http://127.0.0.1/rasa10115/index.php/zoo

I'm not using any pre-xisting template position

Cheers
Paul

Hi Paul

I now have www.vanisrael.be/index.php/klanten en www.vanisrael.be/index.php/fr/clients

Is there any way to leave the index.php and just have the webpage called www.vanisrael.be/klanten? Because they will advertise, mentioning the webaddress.

Thanks a lot for your help!
Stefanie

Hi Stephanie

This page from the Joomla documentation will tell you how:
docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Global_configuration

3.3 “SEO Settings” Group - is the section you need to read, it is about SEF friendly url and Apache mod_rewrite.

When I googled to get he Joomla official doc page this article came up:
thegrue.org/how-to-activate-sef-urls-in-joomla-3.x-and-remove-index.php/

It may be simpler to understand and follow.

CAUTION: If you change the global configuration in Joomla it will change ALL of you url construction. If this is an established website then the existing URL's will be indexed by search engines, so you need to correctly manage the migration to avoid damaging your SEO positions.

If this is a problem for you, then for a small number of pages, you could redirect the www.vanisrael.be/klanten to www.vanisrael.be/index.php/klanten on your hosting or via the .htaccesss file assuming you are using one.

Regards Ian

Hi Ian,

Thanks

Cheers
Paul

Hi all

This was a very useful article. I've followed the steps and now it works: www.vanisrael.be/klanten and www.vanisrael.be/buren.

THANK YOU!
Stefanie

Thanks for the update

and thanks again Ian

Cheers
Paul

Another update but not a good one..the client is unable to open the links. When they click it, they automatically get /fr/ after .be (www.vanisrael.be/fr/klanten) and of course this link doesn't exist. I tested on different phones and laptop and it works fine..the language is set to dutch for these pages.
can't understand what the problem is..
Stefanie

Hi Stefanie

The /fr/ is usually added when you have a multi language site set up in Joomla, so in your case Netherlands and French, with Netherlands as the default language.

I would start looking to check you have an associated page, in both languages, to the [form] page articles, my feeling is issue will be in that setup. I can see you don't have the language switcher module on the landing page, but use it elsewhere on the site, so assume you have pages allocated to languages.

I would check the Netherlands landing page is allocated to that language, not just all, then check the association, you may need a French version even if it is blank!

I think this is where the issue lies, hope it gives you start to investigate.

Regards Ian

What Ian said sounds spot on - thanks Ian

Hi Ian and Paul

I checked the website on these issues:
landing page is allocated to 'dutch' and the French landing page is set to French. I associated both pages to each other.
The articles are set in the correct language and also associated with each other.
I noticed that when I click on the link www.vanisrael.be/klanten, it does not work. However, clicking on www.vanisrael.be/fr/clients does work when clicking on it in an email.

Can I use /klanten? Or do I need to add /nl/klanten? Maybe this is where the issue lies..

Greetings
Stefanie

You would need to use the language versions I think for the url

Cheers
Paul