Removing the Article ID Number

On search engine friendly Joomla 2.5 sites, the URL of articles that are not directly linked to menu items includes an ID number. eg. www.hyde-design.co.uk/test/4-example. Here's how to disable them.

Using a file manager go to components / com_content and rename router.php to something else (eg. old-router.php).

Download this patch file.

Unzip it and upload the router.php file to components / com_content

If you have any problems then delete the new router file and rename the old file back to router.php

For those of you that wish to know which part of the file was updated, lines 27 & 208 have been changed from...

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 0);

to...

$advanced = $params->get('sef_advanced_link', 1);

This will remove the ID number but it will also cause an issue with pages where the alias is only one word long. To fix this comment out lines 228 to 232, so that...

if (strpos($segments[0], ':') === false) {
$vars['view'] = 'article';
$vars['id'] = (int)$segments[0];
return $vars;
}

becomes....

/* if (strpos($segments[0], ':') === false) {
$vars['view'] = 'article';
$vars['id'] = (int)$segments[0];
return $vars;
} */