Hotspots Docs

Routing - aka SEF urls

To create a SEF(Search Engine Friendly) URLs Joomla uses the Itemid. If you don't know what this is, then have a lookhere. Let us say that you've created a new menu item called "My locations" which points to the hotspots map view. The SEF url to your map will look something like this:

http://your-site.com/my-locations

Now if you have a single Hotspot called "my first hotspot" and it is published in "my first category" then the link to the hotspot single view will look like this:

http://your-site.com/my-locations/1-my-first-category/1-my-first-hotspot

This is possible because we try to automatically find out the itemId of your hotspots map. If we didn't do this, then you would end up with an URL like this:

http://your-site.com/components/com\_hotspots/1-my-first-category/1-my-first-hotspot

That is cool, right? The problem is - we don't always get it right. We do our best guess, but sometimes it is not enough. So, if you see wrong urls, then here is the reason:

  • you have created a hotspot menu item that is not linking to the map. The first menu that you have to create once you install Hotspots should point to the map view. Don't create a link to userhotspots or to submit hotspot. First create a link to the map view, then create the other menus. If you've made the mistake to create another menu item first -> just delete it. This should fix the links.

Starting with version 3.1.1 you can have several map views - each map view can have its own start/default category. When we create the links to the single view of each hotspot - we will go through each menu item and try to match the start category selected with the hotspot category - if they match - we have an itemid and we will create a correct single view link.