Custom short URLs in Joomla 1.5

Question

I had a long ugly long URLs for Joomla articles. Being advised here to enable SEF, I got:

www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/120-results-of-DES-project-in-2011

Nicer, but I also want custom short URL for specified article, like:

www.domain.com/des

Is this possible in Joomla 1.5? Simply adding rule to .htaccess is possible but not what I'd like, because:

1. I'd prefer that the short URL remains in the Location bar after the page is loaded
2. Joomla to use that short URL whenever the articles is clicked from news etc.

(P.S.: if it's not possible, then I'd be happy with some simple URL "aliaser" for Joomla, which would work similarly to .htaccess, but preferably with short URL remaining in the browsers' location bar.)

Answer 1

As Trev mentioned you need to turn on SEF URLs. In the admin, in the Site menu click on Global Configuration. In the Site configuration you should see a box for SEO settings. Turn on all 3 options unless you don't want the .html suffix, that one can be left off.

Now Joomla will create URLs like this -

www.yourdomain.com/parent-menu-alias/child-menu-alias/article-alias.html

If the menu item is linking directly to an article, then it would be -

www.yourdomain.com/menu-alias.html

Answer 2

Have you enabled SEF and htaccess in the Global Configuration? If you do then the URLs to any articles is controlled by the article's alias. e.g. if you want an article to be

http://mysite.com/my-url just open the article in the article manager and change the Alias field to my-url