I have also tried OpenSEF, JoomSEF for a large mtree database and found SEF Advance to be the best, fastest & bug-free for mtree extension.

I am really quite new to Joomla! and all that it has to offer, so I had a little trouble gettng the SEF function that comes installed with Joomla! to work properly. But once I got SEF Advance, I was able to easily correct the problem, and I now have URL's that are very keyword relevant. I could not be more thrilled. Being new to all of this (and grossly unfamiliar with anything having to do with web development) Emir, the author of this particular component, was very patient, prompt, and thorough in answering my questions. I was extremely grateful for his help. To someone not versed in the intricacies of computers, this is the most important thing. No matter how good something may potentially be, it is useless if you can't get it to work. Emir stands behind his work, and has certainly earned my respect.

I was going to fire off an email to the author but I figured if I were him I'd rather see it here.

It just works. That's it. Follow the simple instructions and have your entire site's URLs looking exactly how you want. You can do it on a case-by-case basis using individual aliases or tell it to treat certain types of joomla pages in certain ways. You can even stick .html on the end of links or .do or something to really confuse hackers. And it's all done from a handy component interface.

I can't recommend this one enough, well worth the money and TBH it has opened my eyes to the possibilities of pay-for components - I've never bought one before.

This was well worth the money, just in the support that you recieve!!! I have it working fine with a wrapped SMF Forum with the Orstio Bridge.

Works just as advertised.

I was initially a bit leery of the installation requirements. But I brought up IonCube, ran Emir's test script, and then tried the free demo.

It is a relief to have this SEF problem solved--I know what the URLs look like, the links make sense to the general public, and everything works reliably and consistently. I have tried several other SEF solutions, and this is the first one that gave me confidence. The price (40 Euros) is a good value if you want to focus your time on website content instead of getting the mechanics to work right.

This product does what it says - very easy to install, user-friendly and with lots of configuration options. Heally excellent product and highly recommend.
I screwed up when placing the order - gave the wrong email address - Emir was quick to respond which makes me verry confident about any future support I may need. This is supporting a major NHS healthcare portal - For 40 euros why take a chance on anything else ?

I think the component works fine but consider another solution if you ever plan to change your domain name. The author charges for the component and it is licensed to the domain name. If you change the domain name your server will stop working and you have to wait for him to send you a new component.

I had to switch to OpenSEF cause I could no wait any longer. Like I said the component is fine unless you want to change the name of your server.

After using all of the SEF components available for Joomla even for a longer period of time, I always came back to SEF Advance.
One of the things that I noticed, the other SEF components come and go all the time. OpenSEF for example at the moment seems to be unmaintained (again).
Besides just sticking around, it also is working very reliable and does not slow down my Joomla performance like some of the other components I tested.

Just purchased it a couple of days ago because they are running a sale, if they weren't I would still purchase it since everyone using Joomla definitely benefits by some kind of sef.

Originally, when I looked at sef advance, did not like the fact that I had to look into installing ion cube but the ion cube site is very user friendly. Added to that Mr.Sakic has made a script to test whether ion cube is working correctly once you have ion cube installed. Once you have the files all you have to do is put it in your root directory and it works fine. (I use shared hosting and all is needed is to install the files into a root directory folder which I called ioncube). The future for developers is to use ion cube or something similiar so might as well install this now even if you are not going to use sef advance.

So get ion cube, install it, and test it with Mr.Sakic's script.

Sakic advises testing that the "built in Joomla sef" works, which I did, and could not get "the built in Joomla sef" to work with one of my components correctly. You need the "built in Joomla sef" working to use sef advance. I installed sef advance and lo and behold that component worked ok with sef advance installed. If it did not the control panel of sef advance has an option to ignore a component not working with sef_advance.

The sef advance control panel has other options that you can configure but I shall not go into those here because Sakic allows you to download a demo and test it before buying. My advice is test it first before buying. Anytime anybody offers a demo definitely use it before buying.

Do I like the urls sef advance made. I sure do and I believe Google will like them too.

I'd used SEF Advance on several sites in the past and it really worked well. However the core code of the latest version is protected using IonCube, so this needs to be installed on the server. If you are on a shared host, this might not be possible, as your hosting provider might not want to make the necessary changes - mine didn't :-(.

So if you are on a shared server just check that you aren't going to have problems installing.

Other than that, this is a great extension, and highly recommended as it's very easy to set up and configure, plus the support from Emir is good too.

Hi! I am a french user. Both product (I have purchased 3 licences) and support are at Top Level. Documentation is OK. Rate it 5/5 and recommend it.

I’ve been using Joomla! for about 6 months to a year as well as many of the components and modules. I read the basic description for SEF advance and the user reviews. I was impressed because of how it appeared to worked and the Joomla! compatibility, until I purchased it and read the “readme” file. Nowhere on the home page(http://www.sakic.net/) or on the product page (http://www.sakic.net/products/sef_advance/) does it mention that this product doesn’t work with IIS. Its not until you get to the “requirements” section or the FAQ section that this comes to light.
To be fair to Emir Sakic there is a free trial (http://www.sakic.net/products/sef_advance/trial/) available and I should have tried that first as well as the test script (http://www.sakic.net/content/scripting_files/sef_advance_tester.zip) to ensure that I could use SEF. However, I didn’t and went on the user reviews and the fact that I found it here at Joomla.org. So take my advice, before purchasing it like I did, download the trial or the test script, if you are happy that it works then purchase it. If you are using IIS it won’t work.

I'm relatively new to Joomla, and the whole open source PHP script thing in general, so it was great to be able to just install SEF advance and it just work 'out of the box' with no problems. The fact a core developer is behind this plugin means it should continue to work this well with future versions.

i've been using sef advance for over a year. it's a fantastic component. i have run into a few minor limitations, but over all it has been easy to use and wonderful for my rankings. this component combined with good sitemap has allowed me to get indexed in google within hours of puttin up a new site. great work sakic!

This product is so good for the purpose it has, but it lacks some features like controling categories and sections in sef url's by the admin section instead of making alias for everyone. In my opinion if you guys wants to get rid of the section or category part in the sef url, using the alias it will take you a long time.

Owner's reply:
Excluding sections/categories from the URLs is now available in the latest version of SEF Advance.