I spent hours trying to figure this out and thought I would write about the solution. When turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s in Joomla, they begin adding an extra index.php within the URL’s so that it looks something like this – http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/category/article.
I want the URL to be http://www.yoursite.com/category/article.
It’s cleaner and better for the search engines.
So, here are the steps I took to remove the unnecessary index.php:
- Go to the Global Configuration area within your Joomla admin.
-
Under SEO Settings, click YES for the following two items:
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Use Apache mod_rewrite
- Now, go to your htaccess.txt file at the root of your site and rename the file .htaccess.
-
Use some sort of text editor (I use text wrangler) to remove the ‘#’ before the words ‘RewriteBase /
- For me, this was around line 53 of the .htaccess file.
- Now, try to navigate around your Joomla website. The index.php should be gone.
