How do Joomla URLs & Menus Work?
Others have tread before us here..
Even though your Articles are stored in a hierarchy, you can use Menus to dive in to any place in that tree and mix and match. So you could make a menu with two articles from one category, three from another, two external links, a PDF document, and a poll. That’s what I think is cool about Menus in Joomla – you can use them to create all kinds of ways to navigate around and categorize content, regardless of how you have organized your sections and categories.
But…one thing always makes me go a little crazy. How can you tell what the public URL of an article is going to be? Once you write an article and publish it, where is it? Do I really have to add an article to a menu in order for its alias to work?
A little background: For sections, categories, articles, and menu items, you can define an ‘alias.’ This alias is really Joomla’s way of letting you decide what the URL of that piece of content is going to be. If you don’t specify one, it will create one by replacing spaces and some other characters in the title with dashes. So
The Most *Tedious* Blog Post Ever (Title)
becomes
the-most–tedious–blog-post-ever (Alias)
But that still doesn’t work when you try it in your browser. What gives? Well, remember the article lives in a category and section, so those should be a part of your URL too. Ah, and if you don’t specifically add the section or category to a menu, Joomla is going to need the IDs of stuff to be in the URL too, in case some of your aliases are duplicates.
http://yoursite.com/[section ID]-section-alias/[category ID]-category-alias/[articleID]-article-alias(+/-.html)
http://yoursite.com/52-joomla/81-how-to/211-mapping-magic.html
That can be cumbersome at times. If you do add your sections, categories, or articles to menus, that can get shorter and prettier:
http://yoursite.com/section-alias/category-alias/article-alias
http://yoursite.com/joomla/how-to/mapping-magic
Or you can even make a top level menu item out of the single article:
http://yoursite.com/mapping-magic.html
Your “SEF” settings in the Global Configuration determine whether or not .html is added to the end, by the way.
Even if you do understand how Joomla makes these URL decisions, it can still be enraging trying to figure them out. So…
Try out Linkr – Linkr is a Joomla extension that helps you figure out what this eventual URL is going to be. Rather than guessing, Linkr lets you quickly and easily add links to other parts of your site within the articles you’re writing.
