My site recently had serious performance issues, which I was able to pinpoint to OpenSEF. When I disabled OpenSEF, my site worked fine. When I enabled it, links to my content slowed down to a crawl.

I was reluctant to install sh404SEF because I had read several articles from folks claiming OpenSEF was better. Now, OpenSEF does have a pretty admin panel,I'll admit that. But once I installed sh404SEF and configured it, I realized what some of the other reviewers here have said --- IT IS FAST! There was an immediate performance difference, where the content pages under OpenSEF were taking 10 to 15 seconds to load, the same pages under sh404SEF are now taking 1 to 2 seconds to load.

sh404SEF has a caching mechanism which OpenSEF lacks. It also dumps duplicate links to the same content which is very nice.

The admin panel for sh404SEF is not as pretty as OpenSEF, but with such nice performance, who really cares. Plus, the plugins for popular components like Community Builder are fantastic, giving you options on how the URLs for those components will be written.

Very nice component!

Scott
www.quirkee.com

This is far and away the best free SEF component available for Joomla. I was previously using OpenSEF on http://themebot.com/ and although OpenSEF did a good job, the site had become very slow. I have IRC Maxell's page_cache installed, but for initial uncached page loads and for logged in users, the site was very sluggish with OpenSEF.

sh404SEF is ultra efficient and has many useful features. After installing, there was a massive improvement in page load times and a reduction in mySQL queries. Themebot can now accommodate a lot more traffic and serve pages up much faster than before.

There are still a few small bugs, which the author is working hard to fix. Excellent support! Along with sh404meta, this component is crucial to having a large, highly trafficked site that does well in the SERPS. Give it a try and if you like it, send a donation the author's way so that development can continue.

Finally it's there! This is the best SEF engine I've ever used. I've used OpenSEF before and just till now ArtioJoomSEF, but this is really it.

- Works perfectly with Newsportal and Magazine from iJoomla (latest JoomSEF versions do not anymore).

- No more dupplicate pages anywhere!!!!

- Lots of configuration possible (if you want and need to).

Thanx a lot guys. Great extension!

Regards,
Chris

Just install and it is works!

Highly recommended for every joomla user!

I implemented this on two sites flawlessly in less than 10 minutes.

I just wonder, is there support for SMF coming?

I really like this extension, very easy to use however I have problems getting it to work with "com_marketplace" Marketplace Classified Ads Component and "com_newfeeds" RSS component. It would be perfect for me if these 2 components would work with it. Owner, if you read this, maybe you can help me figure it out. :-)

Also, the tooltips under the sh404sef Configuration > By component tab are overlapped by the dropdowns in Internet Explorer

Other than that, no complaints

Owner's reply:
Hi emstalk

Sorry, I overlooked to review. MarketPlace is not natively supported, but if there is a OpenSEF/SEfAdvanced extension somewhere it should work. If not, please report at extensions.siliana.net and we'll find a way to make it work.

As for newsfeeds, it should work natively. Again, please come back to the forum about this if this is still a problem

This component is giving me 302 found error for www subdomain of my site. http://sitename.com works perfectly however..
Also, it creates some table entry http://sitename.com/table/articles/
http://sitename.com/table/news/ for some sections

when I try to edit these and redirect to proper http://sitename.com/articles/ it fails to honor this and recreate table entry or shows 404 error.

i was just going to buy a commercial product, when i stumbled upon this one. had it up and running in a shared host environment in 2 minutes. works perfectly. don't use any other SEF component.

After using a lot of SEF tools this is the best!

The Old SEF404 was also great but was 'black listed' because of a security issue.

I spent several years dinking with Artio and OpenSEF on about a dozen of my customer's sites who demanded SEF URLs, and in each case, I have had problems, sometimes bugs, but often just components that I couldn't get to work fully.

This program is easier than any of the others to install, and I haven't bumped into any problems yet. Congrats on a great product!

Believe all the reviews. This component actually works the way it's supposed to.

I'm another ex-OpenSEF user. There's no reason whatsoever to stick with OpenSEF. I'm not mad at OpenSEF's author, since he went through some rough times during his absence, but I *was* frustrated.

Overall, installation and setup was a breeze. Be aware that you must go to sh404SEF config right away or your visitors will get an error. A few of the defaults weren't to my liking, but it's a snap to change.

Oh, and sh404SEF is FAST!

This component seems to work fine, although it looks like Artio's brother (so is the developer's email). This IS frightening, if you see what Artio is doing with hidden code...
But, more important, Joomfish interaction is weird: I have 3 languages enabled on my site, en, fr and el, and it appends "fr" to both fr and el for the front page.

Owner's reply:
Hi politis,



Both Artio and sh404SEF are forks of a previous component, 404SEFx, hence the common points. I am not sure I understand what you mean by "(so is the developer's email)", I see nothing similar there ?!

There is no hidden code in sh404SEF, I am a pure hobbyist individual.

As for the main point, I cannot reproduce this. My test site runs French, Spanish, English and Russian, and all seems OK. Could you post this report on the forum (extensions.siliana.net/forum.html) with your site details, so I can see what's happening ?

Wow, i read all the reviews, and i was not sure of using this component, because i use on all my sites opensef for long time, but today i try to go to the forum of opensef and the site is no longer online (at this time) i have some problems with virtualmart and opensef, so i download and installed, have some complications at the begining because the spanish file was not update, i comparit with the english and update, and my SITE WORK!!!!

THANKS for this great work, keep up the good work, i am sure that many user will move to use this component.

I install the component and work really fine with Joomla installed in main or subdirectories (not like JPromoter) but doesn't work at all with Hot Properties.

Owner's reply:
hi Edgar,



Most likely i'll be making a Hot Property plugin in the next 2-3 weeks (that is before August 15)

This does exactly what it says it will do. The admin panel for it is intuitive and has a good layout. The website is NOT slowed down in anyway and rankings will DEFINITELY be improved.

I highly recommend using it