First off, this component works awesome with J!1.0.x.

However, I had a lot of problems with the beta version for J!1.5.x. I did some searching on the developer's web site and could not find any real help. It caused my template to completely disappear and the sef links were somehow screwed up. Since I don't have time to deal with a legacy beta version, I'm going to try something else. Perhaps when its stable, I'll give it another try or on a test site. O/W, its probably not a way to go with J!1.5.x.

Owner's reply:
Hi

Have you looked and posted on the support forum ? The native version has been out for about a week now, and it is evolving almost daily...

I've tried a couple URL extensions; one worked but the URLs were not as I had desired and the second simply didn't work. With sh404SEF I was crossing my fingers it would be flawless. Upon installation it didn't work out of the box for my set up but once I found the "advanced" area, I got it working with one minor change; "with .htaccess"

Very well done and I LOVE that I can customize any URL just as I want it. SUPERB!

Downloaded it, save it to my laptop, open my joomla's administrator site, Installer > Plugins .. oops, my mistake, Installer > Components, browse for the file I just downloaded, click 'Upload file & install', go to Components > sh404SEF, click sh404SEF, activated 'Main' tab, marked 'Enabled' yes, click save.. my site runs with sh404SEF with no error..

Excellent!

I just like to say not only is this the best sef component out there but it is incredibly free. This component has so many useful features, where do I begin? It is a swiss army knife for joomla. The most important feature aside from it's ability to rewrite your urls is its security features. It is the best. Security features I wished were in joomla itself. It has saved my site from numerous flood attacks,informed me of would be attacks,allowed me to block them and even educated me. Yannick the developer is a real nice guy too. I can not say enough good things about this component or it's developer. When I was having a problem and wrote him he graciously helped me out and even sent me a new updated version in less than 24 hours. One can see he is really committed to helping the joomla community. It was the nicest thing anyone has done for me in a long time. Thank you very much Yannick and thank you for contributing this wonderful component.

easy and clear to install and manage
really fantastic!!!!

Worked right out of the box, supports non-english UTF-8 characters, LOTS of configuration options, what else ?

This is the best SEF solution for Joomla 1.5! It has everything I need to setup my website url. Most important, the intallation is error free and the component is easy to configure with minimum support.

Thumbs Up! Looking forward to the component to support Joomla 1.5 natively! :)

I am also not so easy moved to write an review but this component surely deserves it. With sooo many options available and support for almost all mostly used used components, and also a helpful support form - the best SEF component. Look no more, some of SEF concurrents are asking you to pay for components with much less functions and slow support, or do a metadata spamming... This is the only SEF component Joomla! user will need.

What a fabulous component! I don't normally feel moved to write reviews on here but this was SO easy to set up and I am really pleased with the URLs it has generated. Thank you!

We're using this on a SOBI2 site and I had the SOBI2 plugin installed and had downloaded OpenSEF and then found out that it didn't seem to be supported anymore (and it was breaking some of my pages.) After reading the reviews, I thought I'd give sh404SEF a try, especially since it mentioned the SOBI2 plugin as compatible. I installed it, customized a few things, republished my plugin and it worked!

Thank you for making it so easy that I didn't have to spend any time on documentation or forums!

It was simple to install and setup.

I did have some hicups in the begining but that was because of my hosting company! Highly recommended!

SH404SEF really blasts every other SEF system away. When SH404SEF was not around I used OpenSEF until it felt apart. After that I tried other SEF systems and later on I finally found SH404SEF.

In the beginning SH404SEF was just a little better that the other SEF systems but a ˝ year ago or so his work accelerated and is now light years away from the other SEF systems. Yannick is now integrating relevant security around the SEF core. Brilliant!

Mosconfig attacks from bots were filling up my clients’ log files until I upgraded one of the sites to this version and discovered that SH404SEF now blocks “mosConfig var in URL”-attacks, which therefore is not logged anymore! Great! Now we can focus on the real errors in the log.

Hey take a look what else SH404SEF blocks:

Base64 injection
Script injection
Illegal standard vars
remote file inclusion
IP address denied
User agent denied
Too many requests (flooding)
Rejected by Project Honey Pot
PHP, but user clicked

If Yannick continues on this way of improving the security of Joomla (which should be adopted into the core of Joomla), we are soon going to have the best SEF and the best firewall integrated into one system. It can very well be that this has already happened – I have not had time to test it through.

One minor thing is that my clients keep finding / using chars in their content titles that are invalid chars in the url, which SH404SEF does not replace (before you insert them manually) and therefore gives a real 404 error. SH404SEF does replace some invalid url chars, but fare from all. I would recommend another approach - replacing every char that is not in A-Z and 0-9 or is “_” or “-“.

I got to tell you I have tried almost every SEO component out there for Joomla but this one Rocks !!

Just upload and Install the component and thats it ! I did not even have to do anything to the .htaccess file. I have many other extensions installed like SOBI and others, they are all SEO friendly with my Joomla site.

Great Component!
Thank you very much for this.!!

This component is a must have ! Working like a charm on all my website !

Thank you very much, Yannick ;-)

This component gives you god-like control over your site, urls, redirects, htaccess (or not) and many other things but you'd better hope it works perfectly the first time you install (which mine did) and that it doesn't cause problems later (which mine also did). My home page immediately went from +/- 6 seconds to load to almost 20 seconds. By the time I disabled sh404SEF a few weeks later, my home page load time was well over a minute. I tried clearing caches and settings for an hour - even tried reinstalling. I'll try again if I can't find a simpler alternative (all I need are human-friendly URLs) but first I'll have to go get a computer sciences degree.