In an attempt to leave our respective comfort zones, Ruth and I have been trying each others specialism in their spare time. Ruth's been having adventures installing and running a GNU/Linux based system, and I've been designing and building a site using Joomla! 1.5

Amongst various issues I've encountered, I found that enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL's broke my new site. Rather than a nicely formatted site, resplendant with images the site returned plain text in a column on the right hand side of a white page!

Although I experienced the issue a while ago, I must admit to ignoring the issue for a while by disabling SEF's again. I've now had to rectify the issue, and after quite a bit of troubleshooting I found the fix couldn't be simpler!!

 

1. Download a copy of your Configuration.php file (I used FTP to access it)


2. Open the file in a text editor (Notepad on Windows, VI/Emacs on Linux)


3. Locate the following line
   
   var $live_site = ''


4. Enter your URL inbetween the quotes, so mine now reads (note the lack of trailing slash)
   
   var $live_site = 'http://www.bentasker.co.uk'


5. Upload the updated file to your site


6. Re-enable SEF Urls


7. Problem solved!

I've still quite a lot of work to do on the site as I've hardly even touched upon the actual look and feel. My initial annoyance with Joomla! is dissipating a bit, although I still have the odd moment!