Possibly not the esiest extension to install (requires Ioncube on the serve), but once done it works very well as adverstised, even for non-English sites (Italian in my case) and with some popular extensions as well, like SOBI2.

Support from the author has been outstanding and the product keeps getting improved.

Ok, you may think I'm one of the author friends...no, I'm not.

I'm happy because I found the solution to the only problem I found with Sef Advance in 2 years, it was because of the NON-ENGLISH characters that were giving me url's like %90% etc..

With Joomla 1.5 and Sef Advance enable "Use title alias" and you will use the nice automatically title alias generated by joomla, and they're all free of strange characters.

This extensions uses no database, is the ONLY ONE around and when your site will became huge I guess you will cry because of performance...enable Debug on Joomla and check the queries your SEF component is using.

I've had a good experience with this extension. I had previously been using JoomSEF. That worked fine, but I had articles that were unlinked for which I wanted a SEF to be automatically assigned. I asked in the forum for a work-around or solution but got no reply.

So, I downloaded the trail for SEF Advance. Emir had a little script that allowed me to see that Ion Cube was already installed on my server, so no problem there.

I found the component to be very straight forward and easy to use. I found a couple of bugs in this release, so Emir and I emailed back and forth a couple times, but he fixed them right away. It was a great support experience, and I was happy to pay the 40 euros.

Now with the new feature to disable category and section from your url it make the site look perfect.
No more http://sitename.com/section/category/name.html
Pierre

Excellent extension. It notably improves your Joomla! site (1.0 or 1.5). If you are going to use short URLs on your site this is the best option.

This is a pretty straight forward component - and works ok, but you can not globally change urls - nor can you globally exclude section or categories from the URL. I have been looking for a good SEF to woork with Virtuemart 1.1 - and this was not it. It created URL's that looked like:
www.mydomian.com/page,shop.browse/option.com_virtuemart/category_id.1/Itemid.53.html
When what I wanted was simply:
www.mydomain.com/shop/myproduct.html
It did however work with the VM search module. In short I would purchase this only if you are happy with showing your section and category names in the URL and don't use Virtuemart.

Owner's reply:
To get advanced URLs in a 3rd party component you need to install the SEF Advance extension. The extensions are available on: http://www.sakic.net/products/sef_advance/extensions/ and extension for VM is provided. When installed you get URLs like http://www.domain.com/shop/hand-tools/hammer/



Excluding section/category titles from URLs is now available in the latest version of SEF Advance.

Sems like to be the only SEF component which is working for 1.5 proberly at the moment. Tested also the other ones which are still having to many errors at the moment so you can't use them in production (ok, some like SEF404 are still in Beta). If you are looking for a sef component for you production site, I think there will be no alternative to it.

*This review is only applicable for SEF Advance for Joomla 1.0.x*

Works mostly OK with decent support. However, I would recommend checking out the free alternatives that are available (sh404SEF for example) before splashing out 40 Euros for this as it's quite a premium. I would have given a higher rating had the developer(s) replied about status of a problem I had (http://www.sakic.net/forum/sef_advance/smf_quote_function_not_working-t357.0.html) -- there has been no response on this since October 2007.

I finally decided to buy the SEF advanced for my joomla 1.5 site.
Tried a few alternatives but at the end i wasnt happy with it so i ended up at sakic.
Install was easy and simple,same goes for the configuration.
But my site had a few weird settings that resulted in a few bad links.
Emir of sakic was kind enough to spend some time on my site solving it..
Im my joomla period i've spend about 500 dollars upto now buying template subscriptions and commercial components.
As a customer were not always fully satisfied with support but the majority is doing a good job on support.
I am realy impressed with emir's help.

I've been through all the free SEO components, but none of them worked with all my modules and components except this one. Installation was effortless (already had IonCube installed for iJoomla Magazine). Took 3 minutes to set up, and everything works great. After spending hours trying to get all the others to work with partial results, I'm happy to spend the money and be done with it. If you have a commercial web site, 40 euros is the least of your expenses.....

If you have a commercial site, you need SEF URLs, and this is the extension I recommend to everyone.

After looking at the options, I tried OpenSEF first - it had good reviews at the time and was free. I liked it, but ran into problems with certain modules and some extensions. After putting fixes into the code and working around issues, I needed to go with another approach.

SEF Advanced does just what I need it to do, creating nice URLs and is usually supported by a wide variety of extensions. I use it on my sites and on every client site.

Out of all the SEF options, this is the one that I've found to be most widely supported. To me, one of the big advantages of Joomla is all the extensions that are available, and therefore the SEF choice needs to be supported as widely as possible.

Issues? Installation can be tricky - especially the first time. It does require ion cube to be installed (no big deal to me, although I've read how others aren't happy about it). And it is definitely limited to the domain name it's licensed on. That can be a pain when getting a new site going, but in the long run it's not a bid deal.

This is the choice for any commercial site.

I meant WORST !! my suggestion don't waste your bucks to buy this component. it cannot change category name and section, first.
And the big problem is, if you just run a newspaper or magazine website and want to do unique URL with year-month-day-contentid such like this http://www...com/../.../bla_20071210.html you could find many duplicate url, just try to erase one of the numbers. try this !

I wanted to buy this extention because I through it was a professionnal one (support included etc..). I saw on different forum that it works great for big websites without consuming ressources of the server..
In fact no support, it doesnt work correctly , very difficult to configure it, lots of bugs..

The worst is that I buy it and I never be able to use it!!
I write emails and post on the forum of the author but no answers at all!!
I wanted a refund..never have any answers.. so forget about this one and try sh404sef which is free, works good, and have a real support from the author.

Having tested various extensions which help convert URLs, I decided to go with SEF Advance based on the recommendation from another developer. I went through the forums and saw users touting how "easy it was to install" and how effective & flexible it was. They're right, if you've done little or no customization to your Joomla site and if you're flexible about following the installation instructions.

I tried for a few hours to get this up and running. The installation instructions said to install the component and replace my htaccess file with the supplied one. When I did this, my site was showing PHP errors and I couldn't log in to my admin panel. The developer stated it was because I'd added a + sign in the URL conversion tool. This is absurd that I can't use a + sign instead of the default - sign, but I digress. After he worked out the "problem" I installed it on my main site (the previous one was a development site for testing) where it failed to work on a default installation. The developer offered to install it for me, which he did free of charge (not really much of an effort on his part). When he sent me an email saying that it was installed and ready to go, I had error and problems all over the entire site. Menu parameters were being ignored and links disappearing. When I asked him about these issues, he pointed my to an FAQ on his site which said I basically had to create a hidden menu duplicating my existing menus in a fashion that SEF Advance could understand. The only other option was to redo my existing menu structure. Having 200+ menu items, the idea of either redoing my menu structure or creating & maintaining an additional identitical menu was not my idea of fun.

He didn't replace my htaccess file, which the instructions said explicitly to do. When I asked him about that, he said that "because you already had an htaccess file there..." But the instructions said to "replace yours with the one supplied"??!? So how was I supposed to figure out that meant "replace it, but sometimes and for no specific reason..." ???

There was a bit of an attitude throughout the process as well. It was never said, but it was kinda like "how come you're such an idiot when so many other people have correctly installed this?" I was warned about this extension from a person at Joomla Days, but I went on the recommendation of a more knowledgeable friend (who has no idea why it's so problematic..but why should he?) Boy, was I wrong to do that. It's commercial development like this that supports Joomla's current push towards the GPL.

Naturally, I didn't get a refund. Caveat emptor.

I used several free SEF components for my sites but I decided to try SEF Advance. Now I can say it's the better SEF component for joomla for sure. The component is very easy to install and manage. You will have a good flexibility to choose your url's extension and SEF Advance work with a lot of third party components like Fireboard, Community builder, moset trees, etc! You want more? OK, you can! Emir Sakic is a PROFESSIONAL like a few guys in the joomla world and the support is very very good!
Thanks Emir for your great work!