After spending quite a bit of time getting Virtuemart and SH404SEF to work together nicely for a project, we needed a way to make sure Search Engine Friendly URLs are implemented in your VirtueMart store in Joomla 1.5.
The problem
I had a working Joomla 1.5 install with Virtuemart 1.1.10 working nicely alongside it. Products looked great, everything was working exactly as it should.
However, one of Virtuemart's big drawbacks is its lack of native support for search engine friendly (SEF) URLs using Joomla's built-in SEF functionality, which results in ugly URLs and reduced SEO for the product pages in our store.
The Solution
SH404SEF is a free component which greatly enhances Joomla's SEO capabilities came up as an excellent free component to do exactly this, especially considering the built in support for Virtuemart.
It gives you a great number of configuration options but unfortunately had issues with the the product category menu tree which was part of our template. The links were neither working or rewriting correctly. After some time searching, I posted on the template providers forums for a solution. There are a small number of bug fixes required to get this working.
Full solution details are available here for anyone encountering similar issues.
