While looking for some improvements of Joomla! native SEF engine I found the following extension quite interesting and easy to use: HP Router of Hannes Papenberg. Installation is straight forward and no struggles at all. For best results you might install this extension before starting any kind of search engine optimization for your website.

But after a short time I was confronted with some 'nasty' behaviour in my website that was introduced by this extension. Some articles did not show up properly and ended in an HTTP 404 error message. Well, actually reading the description of HP Router gave me an idea of the problem:

ATTENTION!! There are a few things you have to keep in mind with this plugin:
1. You can't have the same alias for two articles, even though they are in different categories. To be precise, you can't have the same alias for any type of content item. As a rule of thumb: If you can get to the list of this type of content items from the administrator menu, you can't use the same alias on two items in that list.

My 404 problem is directly caused by duplicated aliases... but not the obvious way!

The reason here is that the extension (as of writing this article) does not respect the state of the articles in the Joomla! CMS. And due to migration processing from previous blog databases I had a bunch of duplicated topics but deleted. This refers to state -2 instead of published content that has a state of 1.

To correct this problem it is necessary to modify two PHP files of the original HP Router:

• hprouter/com_contentrouter.php
• hprouter/com_contactrouter.php

Almost of the end of each file there are the SQL statements to query the database. After you made a backup of your two files you should change them like so:

$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
if($vars['view'] == 'article')
{
$query = 'SELECT id FROM #__content WHERE state = 1 AND alias = '.$db->Quote($vars['id']);
} elseif($vars['view'] == 'category') {

Modified version of hprouter/com_contentrouter.php

$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
$query = 'SELECT id FROM #__contact_details WHERE state = 1 AND alias = '.$db->Quote($vars['id']);

Modified version of hprouter/com_contactrouter.php

With those modifications the HP Router works as expected and queries only published articles. Currently, I am not using the archive state of articles but in case that you will, just extend those two queries to include the necessary state values.

Joomla! content management system (CMS) is great for websites of any type in general. Even using the system as a blog software is quite easy to configure. Instead of the classical Frontpage Layout as default you configure the system to use one of the available Blog Layouts as default page. Then some tweaks according to leading articles, columns, etc. and you are almost done. Almost...

One of the great features that I like with blog application is the ability to display an Archive list of existing articles based on their creation date. Well, Joomla!s own archive functionality works in a similar way but sadly I experienced own mayor drawback: Archived articles are not part of the internal search engine anymore and therefore results are not displayed.

After my usual online research I found a recently added Joomla! extension called Mod LCA of JoniJnm. The description gives the direct motivation / link to other blog applications:

Mod LCA shows articles sorted by year and month, such as wordpress or blogspot

The module itself is really easy to install and works as expected. Almost...

In case that your content is created the usual way, Mod LCA is just fine. But in my special case I did some direct data migrations via SQL statements from my previous blog software and therefore my sequence of itemids differs from the original creation date of an article. It was quite funny to see that an article of June 2006 was listed in December 2009 by Mod LCA. But hey, when does it happen that the ID and the creation date are controversal? Not quite often but it can happen like in case.

Alright, having a look at the source code files of Mod LCA gives a direct glue about how we can improve the situation. At least, it's nothing complicated but the correct order clause of a SQL statement, or? And there we go...

Before any modifications be aware to have a backup at hand. Open the file mod_lca/helper.php with your favourite text editor and change the query statement like so:

$query = 'SELECT a.id, a.title, a.alias, a.catid, a.sectionid, c.alias as calias, '.
$created.
' FROM #__content AS a'.
' LEFT JOIN #__categories AS c ON c.id=a.catid'.
' LEFT JOIN #__sections AS s ON s.id=a.sectionid'.
' WHERE ( a.state = 1 AND s.id > 0 )' .
' AND ( a.publish_up = '.$db->Quote($nullDate).' OR a.publish_up <= '.$db->Quote($now).' )'.
' AND ( a.publish_down = '.$db->Quote($nullDate).' OR a.publish_down >= '.$db->Quote($now).' )'.
' AND s.published = 1'.
' AND c.published = 1'.
' ORDER BY a.created DESC';
$db->setQuery($query);

Modified code of mod_lca/helper.php

The original code orders the result set by a.id and this might cause problems. With this minor code change articles are queried in the expected order and as a consequence in my case my 'Article Time Line' in the sidebar is properly rendered and displayed.

One of the interesting aspects for a blogger might be to know where her/his readers are from. At least, this is something that I would like to know.

Technically, it is not a real problem as every visitor offers its IP address while accessing a website and usually those information and others - like user agent, browser capabilities, preferred languages, etc. - are logged by the web server. Running any kind of log analyzing software like AWStats, WebLog or utilizing external services like Google's Webmaster Tools visualizes that data to the interested site owner.

But what about some more transparency and on-the-spot-visualiztion? I mean, wouldn't it be nice to show your readers that they are not alone on your site? Well, lately I found exactly this kind of visualization on another website and from there I dropped at who's amung us. They offer an easy to use, customizable and free 'map widget' in JavaScript and Flash that can be integrated into a website. Actually, it took me more time to make up my mind about the UI properties than putting the resulting code into my blog site. Take a look here:

GeoLocation of 'Get Blogged by JoKi' reader.

Of course, the services of who's.amung.us only displays the locations the very moment you start using their widget. It would have been nice to provide existing web server logs for the initial setup. But, hey... it's a nice gimmick / gadget and it's for free!

Sincerely, JoKi