Book Image

Joomla! 1.6 First Look

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 1.6 First Look

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

Release of the much awaited Joomla! 1.6 is just round the corner. There is a lot of hype and curiosity about the new features Joomla! 1.6 will provide and how it will affect existing users.Joomla! 1.6 First Look is a concise guide to the new features of Joomla! 1.6, targeted at existing Joomla! users and developers. If you want to see what's new in Joomla 1.6 and how it's going to affect you, this is the book for you. This book will give readers an insight into the new features of Joomla! 1.6, showing them what has changed, how the changes will affect them, and how to upgrade to Joomla! 1.6 from existing Joomla! versions. It begins with general changes in interface and basic articles, and then takes you through the changes in menus, control levels, templates, extensions, and SEO features. It explains the new features and how to use them, drawing attention to significant differences from how things used to behave. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the consequences these changes will bring to you as a Joomla! user or developer.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Joomla! 1.6 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Using search engine friendly URLs


Although the SEO settings of Joomla! 1.6 have remained unchanged, there's still a big improvement: by default, Search Engine Friendly URLs are now turned on. In SEO Settings (found via the Site | Global Configuration | Site tab) the Search Engine Friendly URLs option is set to Yes:

This means that Joomla! sites no longer output unreadable URLs like the ones common to the previous version:

http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8.

The new default Joomla! 1.6 URLs are much shorter and easier to understand:

http://www.example.com/index.php/getting-started.

This is good news for site administrators, as they don't have to change any settings here. The default URLs are fine for search engines.

Note

There's still some room for improvement: all default Joomla! URLs still share the index.php bit. You can get rid of this part of the URLs by using the Use Apache mod_rewrite option, found in the SEO settings section. However, this requires...