Joomla 3.x Search Engine Friendly URL for Articles

Question

I've got a website using Joomla 3.x. The menu items are as follow:

• Home
• Category A (alias: cat-a)
• Category B (alias: cat-b)

where Category A and B are in Category List type.

Also I have set up two categories, Category A and Category B (same alias as menu items) and both contain a few articles which it looks like this:

• Category A (alias: cat-a)
  • Article 1 (alias: art-1)
  • Article 2 (alias: art-2)
• Category B (alias: cat-b)
  • Article 3 (alias: art-3)
  • Article 4 (alias: art-4)

At first, I expect when I visit Article 1, the URL would be something like: http://www.example.com/cat-a/art-1 and good news is it does happen.

However, with the same settings, it looks differently when visiting Article 3: http://www.example.com/art-3

So the question is, how can I make the URL of Article 3 looks like that of Article 1?

P.S. I didn't use any extension for SEF, just the one included in Joomla distribution.

Answer 1

Found the answer. It's because there is another menu item that is linked to the same category list. So somehow it detect conflicts and didn't add the alias of category.

Answer 2

For a achieving something like this, you need to have the corresponding menu items of type Articles -> Category Blog for every category.

The menu item alias will be responsible for the the URL part of the category, while the articles' URL part, will be fulfilled by the article's alias.

Side notes that may be part of your issue are:

If you have a menu item linking directly to an article, then most probably this article will be accessed directly via this menu-item and will bypass the category menu-item URL.