Component shows potential but doesn't quite work. Normally I would say it could just be my site as I have only tested it on one template but others seem to have problems too. It only works on half of the links on my site so is inappropriate. It also has too much unnecessary information in the URL's to be SEO friendly. It is great for a free plugin and it is simple to install and it it definately better than nothing however it's not something I can use at this stage.

I must say this is the simplest SEO solution for Virtuemart as far as I know.

Installation takes 5 seconds & it went smoothly.

The only drawback is that it seems not performing URL rewrite well when you access products categories through Virtuemart Product categories Module (It works perfectly if you access product categories from Joomla Menu).
The generated URL is wrong as it keeps on repeating one of the product category name in the SEF URL eventhough when we click on other product category, the same product category is displayed again in front of the current SEF URL.
Thanks.

I have found this plugin very helpful in making Virtuemart more search engine friendly, though like other users, I agree that the urls generated seem excessively long (do we really need "[category name]/[category id]/" ?) but other than that, it's logical and effective.

I was having significant problems, however, with using SSL and the checkout process in general. Also, I have a few custom VM pages (in the administrator/component/com_virtuemart/html/ directory) that cannot be handled by the router as it is written. So, I made some modifications to fix those problems (the checkout process doesn't use SEF urls as a result, but they aren't indexed anyways, so who cares?) and I'm fairly happy with the result. I detailed the changes on the developer's forum here:
http://joomlaplugins.net/forum/9-general/4-ssl-issue-in-sef-router.html?limit=6&start=6

This is excellent. This is light unlike sh404SEF, which is a heavy component that errors out often. It had so many conflicts on IE. I was about to pay for Yagendoo, but found this. It was the best install for SEO!!

Simple and a very good plug in to enable SEF URL’s in your Virtuemart, once the plugin is install and if everything is correctly set in your site configuration and hosting you will see results immediately in the browsed address bar, after that I created the Google and Yahoo xml maps and the site has started to rank.

Thanks and keep the good work.

I uploaded this file as it says, and it works. I don't know about all the broken this and malformed that some of the other recent reviews mentioned and I hope it all works out for them. But this worked just fine for me.

This would be a great solution if not for two things:

1) It breaks the "Call for Pricing" function in VirtueMart. I absolutely need this function to work properly. With this plug-in enabled, the link shows "Sorry, but the Product you've requested wasn't found!"

2) The URLs still have lots of extra things in them that are not very SEF...numbers, "category", etc.

If #1 would be fixed I would use this plug-in, however.

I can confirm what the previous poster said: during check out, one is routed to the shop-homepage. The SEF-links are not optimal, i.e. to long and unnecessary parts are integrated.

Doesnt work.

My setup:
VM 1.1.3
J! 1.5.14
PHP 5.2.10

It's fair from an SEF standpoint, but it introduces frustrating bugs into Virtumart. Specifically, it seems to break the [Checkout] redirect and instead of sending shoppers to the Checkout it sends them back to the Shop page. I saw a comment about this in a previous review and I was under the impression that this had been resolved. For a shopping cart extension it kind of needs to not break anything, you know?

This module worked great for me with only one exception, I use an AJAX Cart module from shape5 and the images in the dropdown cart are not displayed. I checked the URLs for the images and it was clear they were being rewritten incorrectly and would never resolve to the image path. Thanks for the mod though, always appeciated! :-)

Thanks very much for this extension, but I found a problem in my site: The "Call Pricing" link does not work with the extension, can you help me out?

Thank you for that simple and great solution for VM SEF but in my case there is a little problem. How to replace letters ö ü õ ä? If i have category "kostüümid" and i want to link that i get "kost%C3%BC%C3%BCmid". Is there a fix for that problem? Just to replace them with o u a ! Thank you!

Simple and very effective plugin, easy to tweak as well. Just upload the router.php, in my case I had to make Virtuemart menu alias to hide the 'components/virtuemart' in the URL. Sweet as a nut!

Quick and easy. Works perfectly.

Thanks for the file and the quick response on the update.

I was happy to found your extension wich is working well... but
when you introduce pictures in the description of the products, those don't appaired when we use router.php

This is a great plugin, it's working well for me but with one problem - SSL doesn't seem to work. Any sections of my shop that are SSL enabled do not redirect to https. Instead, it stays on http and I just get 'ssl_redirect.html' appended to my URL.

Is the author aware of this issue, and is there a fix?

Thanks very much.

but I was unable to get the site working with SEF. I put router.php in the correct place, enabled SEF from joomla backend, and renamed htaccess.txt to .htaccess. Still I'm getting 404 error. Have I missed out anything anywhere? Any file permissions?

I like the simplicity of the plugin since I prefer to use the core J! SEF.

However, the URLs are painfully convoluted.

example:
http://www.domainname.com/category/details/69/3/category/product-name.html

this is pretty weird, it is listing the category name rioght after the domain, but the category here is not accurate. It is simply listing the very last menu link i created to ANY virtuemart category. IT then does, /details/iten/category/then the ACCURATE category, then the product name.

I have been going around and around here. I really wish it just went like this:
http://www.domainname.com/shop/category/product-name.html

WOULDNT THAT BE NICE!

The way it is now, if i ever change any menus then the first mention of the category name in the URL will change and all my links will be broken. OOPS!

I have spent a good part of a day searching and trying a couple ways to get my Virtuemart site Search engine friendly. I found the answer with this SEF Router. It took a little while to fiqure out the .htaccess file settings (as it does with all Joomla stuff). Please make sure you have a recently backup for your site before you install, since you may break your site trying to get it setup properly. I am very thankful for this router.

I rarely write reviews, but this was so easy to use! I uploaded the file as instructed and I refreshed my page, and the urls were all SEF for VM..thanks for a lightweight solution that works!