Get rid of ID (category and article) from URL (Joomla 3.3 / 3.4 / 3.5)

Question

I have a Joomla 3.3.6 (edited: 3.5.) site organized in only 3 levels:

• Four big categories (i, ii, iii, iiii)
• Each one divided in some intermediate categories (A, B, C, ...)
• And finally articles
• Two languages (en, pt)

The URL after setting Search Engine Friendly URLs, Use URL rewriting, Adds Suffix to URL and multilanguage support, should be in the form:

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/intercatA/articlex.html

But as many others that have Joomla installed and ask for a solution since Joomla-Baby-Version, I got:

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/666-intercatA/articlex.html

where 666 is a number from hell indicating for no purpose a category ID

Now browsing for an answer, I found this answer:

 Edit “components/com_content/router.php“
 (You’ll probably have to re-do this step every time you update Joomla.)
 Replace the lines 38 and 290 with:
 $advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 1);

 and Replace line 426 with
 ->where($db->quoteName(‘alias’) . ‘ = ‘ . $db->quote($segment)); 

Well, first of all, line 426 is already like that in the original. Second, this does not do the trick. It do works with:

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/intercatA/articlex.html

But it breaks wit a 404 error if you browse to:

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/intercatA.html

Also, I noticed that the ID numbers are different. While the whole URL is

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/666-intercatA/articlex.html

The same category description page is

http://www.example.com/en/bigcatiii/333-intercatA.html

There is also another solution that sound better, but also do not work, based on .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (\d+)-([^/]*) $2 [R=301,L]

The URLs appear ok, but the pages are not found. It would be so much better if we can provide a solution using .htaccess instead of changing Joomla core.

Still, changing the Joomla core would just fine, if this other googled suggestion was valid.

 Copy “components/com_content/router.php” to “/templates/your-template/html”

Meaning that once you moved router.php to your "local", you wouldn't need to redo all the stuff after an upgrade. (Unless, of course, router.php is updated, in case you would better mirror it again.)

Thanks for your time to solve this puzzle!

References

1- Change/ Remove Article ID in URL?

2- Removing the Article ID number

3- How to remove article id in url?

4- Remove article id from url for joomla 3.0

5- Enabling SEF

6- Remove article id from joomla 3 URL

7- Remove article id from joomla 3 URL

8- .htaccess redirect rule

9- Test .htaccess

---

Edited (2016/May/02): NEW Bounty for Joomla last version 3.5

Answer 1

I've just newly installed a joomla 3.5 and the old method works for me. Since something has been modified in the router file, you have to repeat the procedure after a joomla upgrade.

The lines are now 34 and 295 in ./components/com_content/router.php.

Again change the 0 into 1 so that it becomes:

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 1);

My URL is e.g. http://joomla.lan/en/category-en-gb/article-en-gb works fine with Search Engine Friendly URLs on.

With Adds Suffix to URL switched to Yes an .html is appended to the URL.
Use URL Rewriting and Unicode Aliases work optionally. When using URL rewrite engine on IIS7 or Apache, you have to rename htaccess.txt into .htaccess and webconfig.txt into webconfig. Note that some hosters have a restrictive server configuration. If you get a 500 internal server error, you might need to edit .htaccess and comment out the lines Options +FollowSymlinks and/or Options -Indexes and/or RewriteBase / by adding a preceding #. The latter is already deactivated in Joomla 3.5. A RewriteBase setting is useful when Joomla is installed in a subfolder, not the web root.

On other servers set Use URL Rewriting to No.

---

I can't reproduce your problem, everything is working correct with those two code edits. Please try it out again and if you can't resolve, post the exact behavior (urls, errors aso.) If you can not get it fixed, you might have to reinstall the sources.

Answer 2

After looking into it, I found some useful pieces of information. DISCLAIMER I don't use Joomla and haven't tried this on a working installation, these are only results of some searching & reading source code. Anyway, here's what I found.

From what I have gathererd, it seems that changing

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 0);

to

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 1);

should be enough. Be careful though, with this option, probably both URL (with and without IDs) will be available which isn't good for SEO. Problem is with the 404, but that seems like a problem with the Joomla routing system. You could compensate the 404s with menu links which are only configured but never used (see below).

Some origins of your problem:

• For example, in their routing, they use the menu to find the category ID (Line ~385 // We get the category id from the menu item and search from there)
• For each URL segment (separated by the /), they first search category aliases, so be sure to check your aliases. If they cannot find the alias in the categories, they rely on the ID in the URL for their search query (Line ~425 ->where($db->quoteName('catid') . ' = ' . (int) $vars['catid']))
• When a categoryID or articleID is attached to a menu, they remove the category ID $query['catid'] because they know they have a unique global alias (Line ~69)

Therefore, one solution is to do the following:

You could try and create a menu item for each category and each article. Even if the menu is not displayed anywhere and only configured in the administration interface, it will create global unique routing aliases for categories and articles which will let Joomla find the right article/category. From what I understand, when a category or article has a menu item, then only the title aliases are used. But since they don't have any, they use the combination of id + slug to locate the resource.

Since a lot of people are complaining about this, it should be fixed in Joomla 3.5

References & Discussions:

• A blog giving some solutions and explanations about this issue: http://developernote.com/2012/05/how-to-remove-id-from-url-in-joomla-2-5/
• A joomla forum thread discussing your problem and it's solutions: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=712&t=826165&start=30
• Maybe some plugin solves this issue: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef

To finish on a bright note, it seems that the developers are aware of the limitations ;)