Flexible Web Services Info Tech Support

AceSEF has a very frustrating interface. It appears almost clumsy. I have been trying to straighten out the numerous SEF links it's created and the absolute catastrophe of a sitemap. My problem is the dynamic sitemap likes to add unpublished articles but the xml sitemap follows the assignments in the SEF management pages. Due to the several unpublished pages it placed in the dynamic sitemap, have had to run around trying to get rid of the search engine cache that keeps pointing to pages that weren't cached. I suppose I should start with how I ended up with this module.

I only needed to fix the SEF portion of Joomla. AceSEF didn't fix that or even point out where there might be a problem. I'm not that good with Apache or PHP so I stumble around a bit. I finally found where Apache2.conf was missing information. The site never loaded the .htaccess file and therefore never read the rules for re-writing the mods. Once that was fixed, I already had AceSEF which had a nice metatag engine and sitemap generator. As I've already stated, those both exploded in my face.

Now my problem is the frustrating i have with the concept of published (within the context of AceSEF) and deleted or trashed. Apparently, Unpublished in the SEF tab means that it won't publish in the static sitemap.xml file. I'm sure that's not what they intended, but that appears to be the way it works for me. The 404 page has no explanation that helps at all. Unpublished doesn't seem to mean a thing. When a link shows up in the 404 pages it is registered as unpublished. If you use the button at the top of the 404 page to move it, it only gives you a empty move page. This was frustrating, but now I realize this button really means new 301 page (but why have it on the 404 page). Even checking the item and clicking the 301 button does nothing but give you a blank form. I found that clicking on the actual link gives you a 301 form with the link in the old URL slot. Never would have figured that out from the tutorials or the helps.

I bought the VIP but I haven't called. I really want to make sure I've read all the helps before I waste someone's time. If you use that 301 creation page, you cannot leave the 404 page in there. Even though it's unpublished, it still redirects to a 404 error page and the 301 page never gets loaded. All these left overs seem to cause other problems. I had one page that I would get an error, "too many redirects" even though I couldn't find where it was getting an additional redirect. I have wiped out the SEF database 3 times now. I have made changes to the SEF format because I realized I really don't want duplicates and I have to figure them out. Well that causes another problem because the new SEFs don't match the old SEFs so now I have to deal with even more scattered crap. 

None of this would happen if the program didn't generate stuff I didn't want or if it was documented well enough to figure out how it worked. Even the web site gives no help. The web help is an exact duplicate of the help that comes with the module inside Joomla. They don't even bother with additional explanations. I might add that the online videos are also only partially helpful. The fact that they go through every little option is the only help they add, but it's almost the same as if you went through every little option yourself and read the little pop up links that explain each option which goes something like this: Generate new SEF URLs - this generates new SEF URLs. Well it is a little more wordy. "If set to NO, no new URLs will be generated and only those already in database will be used."  I can't tell you how often I want to turn that off. The pages actually seems to load fine without it, but one must be careful if cache is enabled. I had been looking at the wrong page for hours when I discovered that it was the cached page. I cleared the cache and found the page was a 404 error issue. 

Another buggy problem is 404 errors do not show up all the time. It seems that if it hits the SEF 404 page, you will never see what caused it. Hmmm. I just had a thought that I might turn that off so I can see the real 404 pages which give a little more info and may show up in the 404 locker.