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Alias for Page Title Plugin >SEO without core hack 
Installation:
- Install the .zip package
- Go to 'Extensions -> Plugin Manager'
- Select the 'content' type plugins
- Look for ' Content - Alias For PageTitle' and publish it.
- You can edit the plugin parameters to add a standard suffix or prefix to your page title
- You can edit the plugin parameters to set uppercase/lowercase preferences
From now on, the title tag will consist of the article's Alias instead of using the regular Title.
No core hack here, just a small simple plugin with no hazard in future upgrades of the core.
Update may 9th 2008 (version 1.2):
Unfortunately, the Joomla 1.5 stable code created a lot of changes to the Alias field's content. Spaces are automatically replaced by dashes, and the content is changed into lowercase. Dashes are automatically reconverted into spaces by this plugin.
I have added some plugin parameters which enables you to set your preferences for uppercasing all words, only the first letter, uppercasing the whole title, or keep all characters in lowercase.
Besides that, you can now also set a prefix and/or suffix to your page title
If you have an older version of this plugin installed, please uninstall that version first, and then install this new version. No data will be lost in the process (not by this plugin at least..)
check http://www.vak18.com/joomla_plugins for information.
But some fine tuning will make it an excellent plugin :
1) open and close inverted commas are not displayed correctly.
Instead of :
"Departure" Is A Great Movie
It will reflect:
QDeparture Is A Great Movieq
2) It is not working correctly if you upgrade to Joomla! 1.5.10 Frontpage page title (Home Menu Page Title) will be replaced by some other article title.
I have to disable the plugin for now...but I am still waiting and looking forward for your new upgrade. :)
There is a problem if you use ö,ä,å characters in alias. They will be converted to ae, oe etc. Is there any solution for that?
Unfortunately, this conversion is a joomla core 'feature'... that i believe cannot be overruled by a plugin.
The joomla core uses a filter on the alias to make it an URL safe string, you could alter line 127 of the file /libraries/joomla/database/table/content.php but that would involve a core-change that can be overwritting during your next upgrade.
Works great without hacking the code.
Thanks!
Just the preferences let a little wish open: couldn't there be an obvious option "let it be as is". I have a site which in 30% of the articles uses abbr. like USP for title, but the rest doesn't. When I choose "all uppercase" the majority of titles looks ugly, when i choose "first letter uppercase" the abbr. titles look - just wrong.
So please give us an "let it be" option, as Mother Mary already advised.
Sorry for this late reply.
I agree that a 'let it be as is' option would be much preferred. Actually, i would have let the 'upper/lowercase' option completely out of the plugin, if only Joomla would leave the Article Alias alone...
Joomla automatically changes the Article Alias into a lowercase representation (and replacing spaces by dashes), which makes it difficult to have a nice and beautiful title alltogether.
The uppercase/lowercase options are the best i could think of to have at least a little control over the appearance...
Any suggestions to further improve the plugin are always welcome... I will try to find a way to prevent Joomla from lowercasing the Article Alias in the first place, but i'm afraid that will not be possible without a core-hack....
Pro:
- Simple to install
- Simple to use
Con:
- Not compatible with Joomla 1.0 (like says)
Very easy to use, and very helpful!
Unfortunately it will not be possible to create a similar clean implementation in pre J1.5 sites. This simple plugin uses the events in joomla 1.5 to adjust data on a certain point during execution, which is impossible with Joomla 1.0.x.
I guess you'll have to use one of the core hacks for J1.0x and hope for a quick J1.5 release to use this plugin.