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Category: Joomla

Hand pointing to URL that has been rewritten by Joomla

Joomla 4 – how to get rid of index.php from your URLs

I’ve just started using Joomla 4 for some new websites and it’s just as easy to use as the older versions. Some things are a bit unexpected, but basically it’s the same as before once you find where everything is packaged.

So just a little note for how to get rid of the .index.php from the URLs so they read well for humans and those pesky search engines.

Step 1 – Enable Use URL rewriting in Joomla 4.

From your dashboard, top right there are system short cuts. Find Global Configuration and scroll down until you get to the SEO settings. Enable URL Rewriting.

Step 2 – Change the htaccess file on the server

Get to your files on the server, via ftp or a file manager, and find the htaccess.txt file in the site root folder. Rename it to .htaccess. In my install, that was already there, so I renamed the htaccess.txt into something else and that did the trick.

The result: Beautiful short URLs.

Enjoy!

How to lock down documents

Amidst the current corona crisis, one of my clients needed a quick fix to communicate some potentially scary documents with their staff without alerting the public, and they didn’t have an intranet.

We had a brainstorm to look at the existing website capabilities without the need to setup a separate login area and to minimise admin, and DocMan from Joomlatools had the required features.

One option was to stop search engines from indexing the documents on the website. You can see here how to stop indexing.

The perhaps better option however was to also lockdown the documents completely to a user group that would only internally be granted access. So we set up a new access level with viewing permissions specifically for this type of documents. You can see how to lock down documents in DocMan here.

That way, no second system is required, and a shared internal login makes the access relatively easy.

Ultimately, a user based registration process that can enable and disable staff access is obviously the preferred solution but as a quick fix that worked for them.

coronacrisis, workarounds