Hey Zafer,

I am sorry for the delay of this reply, may i know what is your previously URL format?

Also is it can provide us with your Joomla backend and FTP access so we can better have a look?

By the way, in the future you can just include your site's access once at http://stackideas.com/dashboard/site rather than needing to keep adding them in your replies

Hello Arlex,

I though that it is a setting issue.

Here is the current setting:
URL format for post view: http://yoursite.com/menu/title
Routing behavior: Use current active menu item ID
Allow unicode aliases: Yes

So where do post ids come from? It seems there is no setting for it.

Do you plan to do the same (including post id into URL) for EasyBlog?

Best regards,

Zafer

It really doesn't matter if the "id" is present in the URL. Although there is no solid facts and Google wouldn't disclose them, try googling this out. Many webmasters / site owners thinks that the URL only gives very small impact to SEO and since the permalink is already used in the URL it is fine

Thanks.

EasyDiscuss 3 has URL in form of example.com/discussions/post-title. If we upgrade to EasyDiscuss 4, URL will become example.com/discussions/id-post-title.
What I can do to keep the URL as it was before upgrading to EasyDiscuss 4?

It is not possible and we will not recommend that. This is why (based on the importance):

1. Not adding an ID to the URL will have better performance overall. If you do not use the id, you need to fire at least additional 3 - 4 queries and also check for conflicting view names.

E.g: Imagine if your post title is "index". Your title is conflicting with the view name unless you explicitly do a file stat to check for view names.

2. Joomla by default uses this standard and we are following the standards.
3. It does not have any impact at all towards SEO.

But we have ten thousand posts with old style URL. How to redirect the old ten thousand URL to the new?

Unfortunately right now it is not possible and the only way is for you to add some hacks in the file /components/com_easydiscuss/router.php so that the urls generated doesn't have an id and when you parse the permalink, find the appropriate id based on the permalink.

Mark wrote:
Unfortunately right now it is not possible and the only way is for you to add some hacks in the file /components/com_easydiscuss/router.php so that the urls generated doesn't have an id and when you parse the permalink, find the appropriate id based on the permalink.

So, hacking means no update from you - like what my team did. My team has been having to patch EasyDisscuss itself for two years.
But upgrading my site to EasyDiscuss 4 without hacking means hundred thousands of visitors will see 404 (page not found) for a long time before Google indexes new URL and removed old URL without any transition.
I suggest you guys to create a script to import redirect URLs into com_redirect for smooth transitions. Otherwise, your customers will be hurt and they will not be happy of course.

P/s: I find that your own forum's post URLs have no ID?

Our forum runs on a custom and modified version to suit our requirements and I believe it is running on much older version of EasyDiscuss, hence there is some slight delay on our forums

Given the chance and time, I would definitely go for ID-permalink for our forums and I will rather let Google re-index the forums rather than worrying about generating 404. It's fine to generate 404

For me there is also a big issue. All the url's that have been shared in facebook, in other forums (big promotion for my site to get visitors) now redirects to Error: 404 page. So sad .

Hey Dalia,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply as it is a weekend for us here.

Perhaps you can start a new thread and provide us more info regarding this issue?

1. Joomla backend and FTP access
2. What is your discussion link from Facebook
3. What is your previous discussion link format

transition is very very much important. From my experience with an old site of ours four years ago, 92% visitors left the site as soon as they saw 404. That was our hurt, our revenue reduced almost 70% for that month of migrating without transition.
Please consider this. I can pay for that if you need some credit backup.

Hey Tran Tuan,

I am sorry for the delay of this reply,

Can you start a new thread regarding your issue so we can better have a look of your 404 error which you mentioned in your previous reply?

I am just curious about something.

Why post ID is located before post title like "site.com/forum/15454-post-title", instead of after post title like "site.com/forum//post-title-15454"? Do you have any specific reason to choose this order?

In my opinion, numbers (post ID) between domain name and post title, they look a little bit strange and disattract your attention from post title. I see some wordpress sites which put post IDs at the end of the URL and my eyes feel pretty comfortable with that structure. Numbers (IDs) have no primary importance for users/visitors and they could be located at the end of the URL such as site.com/forum/post-title-154575.

What do you think?

Zafer,

The reason that the id is prepended rather than appended is because of the typecasting in PHP. Running the following codes would result in getting the correct id:

In fact, this is how Joomla core extensions are doing this.

Thanks for the answer, Mark.

No problem