Into the Wild Spaces

Custom Graphics

My first problem was that in updating to 1.10 Fantastico overwrote some of my custom template configurations, which was annoying but not unexpected, and was easily corrected by re-uploading my saved files from my backup server. That included my favicon.ico and several custom graphics.

HTACCESS

A more vexing problem was what Joomla calls "SEO" or Search engine optimization. Joomla 1.04 didn't have a problem with this but Joomla 1.1.0 ships with a broken HTACCESS file that doesn't allow the Apache server to rewrite URLs correctly, and upon turning it on my entire site broke. OK, breathe deeply and start digging around to see what changed.

An afternoon's worth of Googling found me examples of HTACCESS files that work, and in comparing them to my own I was able to figure out that mine needed to look like the following:

 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR]
##optional - see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
#

Modifying some of the other settings in Joomla's included HTACCESS file made things worse, not better, which helped point out the direction in which my research needed to travel. This was an annoying and vaguely unforgivable problem, the kind of bug beta testing should have identified. But life goes on.