Removing numbers from URL in Joomla

On September 19 2017, Joomla version 3.8 was released.

One of the improvements is the new routing system. In this article I will explain to you what the routing system does and look at the improvements in this system.

What does the Joomla routing system do?

The routing system takes care of creating the URLs, which you can find in the address bar or in links on the website.

For example, the URL: https://www.mijnwebsite.nl/index.php/8-joomla-artikelen/1-artikel-over-routing

This is a default URL created by Joomla and shows the article called "article on routing" which is in the "Joomla articles" category.

This link reads well, both for humans and search engine robots like Google's, but it could be better. And if it's better, Google likes it, your Web site increases in value and you move back up the search results page a bit.

Remove the index.php from the URL.

This has been possible for Joomla for a long time, but I still see this on several websites.

It is relatively easy and quick to modify in 2 steps.

1a When your website is running on an apache server (this is in 90% of cases) then you first rename the file " htaccess.txt " in the root directory of Joomla to " .htaccess "

1b If your website is running on an IIS7 server then rename the file " web.config.txt " in the root directory of Joomla to " web.config ".

2 On the Global Configuration page (found in the /administrator via  system > Global Configuration) set the "Use URL rewriting" option to Yes.

The link now looks like this: https://www.mijnwebsite.nl/8-joomla-artikelen/1-artikel-over-routing
You can see that index.php has disappeared from my URL.

Remove numbers (Category IDs and Article IDs) from the URL.

So far it wasn't much new, but we want the URL to be even nicer and we think the numbers in the URL are unnecessary.

What are those numbers in the URL anyway?

The number 8 refers to the ID of the category

And the number 1 refers to the ID of the article

Until Joomla 3.7 it was only possible to remove these numbers from the URL by creating a menu item for the category and for each article. In itself, this is not a big problem for small websites, but when you have more than 50 articles , it is tedious work.

In the new versions of Joomla is here with the new routing system a solution. To do this, you go to article management and click on the "options" button at the top right.

In options, click on the Integration tab and you will see the option "Remove IDs from URLs".  You set this option to Yes.

The link now looks like this: https://www.mijnwebsite.nl/joomla-artikelen/artikel-over-routing
You can see that also the Category IDs and Article IDs has disappeared from my URL.

New routing not only on articles

All components will get these options. The Joomla components such as user management or contacts will have this option available immediately from Joomla 3.8. The components made by third parties will be customized by the developer and also in these components you will have to turn on the modern routing system yourself.

Notes

When you enable this option on an existing website, the old URLs will no longer be valid. Google has probably indexed these old URLs and error messages may occur. Also, links from others to your website may suddenly no longer be valid.

You can solve this problem by using "referral management," but the question is whether you want to spend a lot of time on it with many articles.

For new sites, of course, the new router is excellent.

It is important that a menu item is created for each main category. If you don't, you will get strange URLs such as: https://www.mijnwebsite.nl/?view=article&id=1:artikel-over-routing

The ?view=article&id= shows the system that the router cannot determine how to format the URL.

You don't need to create a menu item for each category, just the main category. E.g. for the main category "News" a menu item is created and the categories below it such as "sports" and "technology" are not. Even then, the URL is created properly and it looks like this, for example: https://www.mijnwebsite.nl/nieuws/technologie/artikel-over-routing