Joomla 1.5x Menu Items

Hello

On doing further research into what I thought was a problem with SEF URLS I am now fairly sure the problem is coming from menu items and that if I want urls to work properly I need to set them ALL up as menu items. Even ones that I dont really want shown (I have thosands of pages, cant have them all linked).

I want to know if it is possible to display Parent main menu items, but not show their child articles UNLESS the parent menu item that it belongs to is actually selected.

Is that possible in Joomla 1.5x ?

Pls shed some light, this morning has been a tough battle

 

You don't need to set URLs as menu items. You can use extension like Sh404SEF for this purpose.

 

that extension sounds great, only problem is im in a prehistoric version of Joomla (1.52 I believe). I cant seem to see a version that would be compatible with my Joomla ver? do you know of an equivalent ?

 

You can still get old versions of Artio JoomSEF, 404SEF and others if you dig on the developer's sites. Or send them a contact email and ask for an earlier version. Of course, you really need to get that thing updated ASAP. 1.52 is very insecure at this point. Migrating is a pain in the rear but it's necessary at that point. I've done it to four sites so far including my main that had 1000+ articles on it. It wasn't fun but it was well worth it in the end. 2.5 adds so much more control to how things work.

 

Thanks for your reply, how long did it take you to do your main 1000+ article sites migration? I have 1.5k+ pages myself and thats what worries me :-/ Dont fancy re entering it all

 

Not too long, as long as you have a decent web host. I did it on GoDaddy and the thing that made it most difficult was getting timeouts because of the amount processing time needed for some of the steps. Since then I bought my own VPS because I was sick of it.

If you can, set up a subdomain for your new site instead of just putting it in a subfolder of your main site to put the new J2.5 files in. Get a good conversion component (I used SPUpgrade). There are freebie migrators but my experience was that SPUpgrade was much smoother and did a better job.

The only major problem I ran into was the URL's breaking all of my links at first. You have to make sure you have the same SEF URL component running on both the old and the new site.

The big piece of advice for any migration though, make sure ALL of your components are available for the new system and then install them BEFORE you run the migration assistant. Otherwise when the menus are created they will be looking for components that don't exist.

If you need some help with this let me know. I've done it on an hourly basis for two other clients so far (not including my own site). Like I said, the only really time consuming part (aside from uploading files and installing components/modules/etc.) is making sure the URL's match up so you don't break all your inbound links.

 

Come to think of it... I have no idea what your site is about, but when I migrated I also went through the process of trimming the fat off of my site. I deleted a ton of old content that was receiving little or no page views in order to help my overall SEO and page rank. If you have 1.5k of pages my guess would be that you probably have some antiquated content that you should think about removing. If so I would suggest doing it BEFORE you migrate. Migrating a clean site is much easier than migrating a bloated one.

 

Thanks for your responses on this and your advice.

I am seeking a service provider to pay to assist with this migration.

The majority of the stuff I use for example for Search engine friendly urls is just the basic component that was already installed in Joomla 1.52 (it wasnt an addon I put in myself)

My main worry is the theme JW_CLEAN_PRO, I dont know if that will work with Joomla. And I edited it quite a bit to make it right so would be quite sad if I had to lose it.

I do not have much in the way of custom addons - SIMPLE REVIEW is one I use to store reviews for games.

My website has a lot of pages about old games in teh super mario series (its a super mario fan site) which are not "new" and could be considered old - but the point of the site is that we cover Mario from the very very beginning to the modern games - so I couldnt really trim, except maybe get rid of a few old news articles.

Dont suppose you'd be interested in quoting me on migrating me? :-D

 

Depending on how complicated the theme is updating it to run in 2.5 can be fairly easy or, if it was not written well to begin with it can be a pain... I've done a few on my own but then I have also hired freelance coders to rewrite the more complicated ones. If it relies a lot on java or other 3rd party plugins then it becomes more difficult. I would have to take a look to tell.

It looks like Simple Review is available as a free 2.5 component. No problem there.

I'll send you a private message to discuss it.