Joomla provides a great system for creating aliases for each article by using the article-title. But if you need to change between transliteration or unicode then you have to create new aliases manually for each single article. When editing an article there is a spot near the title to edit the alias. So you can do this manually. But what if you don’t want to have to spend many time for this? Wouldn’t it be nice if this is done automatically for all your joomla articles in one step directly in the database? That’s what this plugin is doing.

Whenever you have one of these problems:

• you have to switch from transliteration aliases to unicode aliases in joomla configuration
• you have to switch from unicode aliases to transliteration aliases in joomla configuration
• you won't switch between unicode and transliteration but you have wrong aliases (e.g. some date- and time-stamps)
• you have manually given aliases for your articles and you like to switch back to the title-aliases

then the ALIAS-Generator is your solution.

Aliases are short pieces of text that represent the title of your Joomla Articles in a machine-friendly format. This format allows only lowercase letters and dashes (-).

Aliases are used by Joomla to make Search Engine Friendly URLs. There are technical limitations to the types of characters that can be included in URLs, so Joomla prevents problems with invalid characters by allowing you to specify an alias.

You can fill in an alias yourself. If you leave the alias field empty, Joomla will automatically create an alias from the Title field of an item when it is saved. This means that if you edit the title of an item, but you leave the old alias in its field, the alias (and the URL that is created from it) will not change. Empty the alias field if you want generate a new alias.

In joomla configuration you can choose the way how joomla is creating these aliases. You can choose between "Transliteration" and "Unicode" aliases. When saving edited content, the former setting attempts to convert, where appropriate, any alias text into the corresponding Latin characters. The latter setting leaves any non-Latin characters in the alias text unchanged. Changing this parameter does not retroactively change aliases, it just changes the behaviour of automatic alias generation for future content editing and creation.

Now you can use ALIAS-Generator to do this also for all your existing articles automatically in one step.