Question URL Rewriting Setting turns off my Kunena forum in the front end

Your problems could be caused by any number of things. Your Joomla "one-click" install could have been faulty; file permissions (somewhere) could be incorrect; your Joomla menus might be a completely tangled. I really cannot say.

One thing that I can say, with absolute certainty, is that the URL for your forum is oddly-formed. There should not be any "index.php" in the URL if you are using standard Joomla SEF URLs. You do not see any "index.php" in the URL at this site, do you?

I am looking to see why it is that I never have a problem with Joomla SEO and so many other people do have problems with it. I will post again later on this subject whenI have made some discoveries. Maybe I'm just lucky that I have never had a problem with Joomla SEF URLs in the 300+ Joomla sites I have worked on? (I don't think it's luck, of course; it's all about how one goes about building a Joomla website right from the word "go".). I distrust those one-click Joomla install scripts and I never use them. Maybe there's something in that approach?

Appreciating all your assistance, Sozzled.

Taking your points in reverse order;

My background as a safety electronics engineer taught me to build good foundations and then add components, testing as you go, so I'm with you on the approach, and that is what I've done. This problem, though, is in the foundations.

I'll take your advice on the one-click install features. Do you also distrust the Joomla web-installer in the Extension Manager?

I look forward to your post when you've done your research. If you remember, could you flag it up for me please?

You do not see any "index.php" in the URL at this site, do you?

No, I don't, and I don't see it on my site either. Where do you see that???

your Joomla menus might be a completely tangled

I'll download the latest Joomla zip file again from the joomla site and start again from the beginning (for the umpteenth time!).

Thanks again.

Martin-123 wrote: I'll take your advice on the one-click install features.

My approach - call it "folklore" if you like - is to install Joomla in the time-honoured "traditional" manner. This means that you take the original Joomla distribution kit, download it to your PC, extract the .ZIP file and then FTP the files thus extracted to your webserver. This means you should also use your cPanel (or other tools provided by your webhost provider) to create the required SQL database, create a SQL username and give that username all privilges necessary to add/update/delete tables. Then it's a straightforward case - or it should be straightforward - to run the initial Joomla installation procedure.

As far as file/folder permissions are concerned, see Securing Kunena .

After doing that, implement Joomla's SEO as we've talked about before making sure that you've got the [renamed] htaccess.txt file located in the site root folder.

Martin-123 wrote: Do you also distrust the Joomla web-installer in the Extension Manager?

I use the standard Kunena installation procedure described in K 3.0 Installation Guide (watch the video, too).

Martin-123 wrote: sozzled wrote:

You do not see any "index.php" in the URL at this site, do you?

No, I don't, and I don't see it on my site either. Where do you see that???

I see the URL in the browser address when I click the "Forum" menu item on your site. In your case it looks like this:

http://<your-domain-name}/index.php/forum

Strange, isn't it?

A "nicely-formed" Kunena URL should look like this:

http://<your-domain-name}/forum

install Joomla in the time-honoured "traditional" manner

Right. That's what I'll do from now on. In fact I'll adopt every procedure and piece of advice from this post. Many thanks, Sozzled. I really appreciate it.

I see the URL in the browser address when I click the "Forum" menu item on your site

How did I miss that? Ok, I'll watch out for that when I re-install.

Martin

I can't promise you that this will necessarily solve your problem. As you may have guessed, sometimes webcraft is not the precise science that it's supposed to be and sometimes I just use "whatever works for me" (which may sound a bit like relying on fairy tales). Whatever method you use, the best advice I can give is to take it slowly, one "baby step" at a time, keeping things nice and simple.

Just as in real life, human beings have to learn to sit up before they can crawl (and before they can walk or run). I know (from my few years of experience with building websites) that some people think they can build a website just like any other professional - I'm not, not for one moment, suggesting this about you, Martin. but people can become discouraged and blame the software/tools when their first attempts are unsuccessful. We all have to start somewhere and I hope I've been helpful in giving you that start.

Let's see how we go from here.