Migrate from OpenCart to CubeCart - SEO

[FrankR]

Hello.  I have an OpenCart store with an issue that I have not been able to resolve.  I am considering to throw in the towel and I'm evaluating my options.  CubeCart looks like it has similar features but also includes simpler upgrades and a Canada Post shipping module.

It looks like I'll be able to set up the same SEO-friendly paths for my products except that CubeCart adds ".html" to the path.  Is there a simple way to prevent CubeCart from appending .html to my paths or is there a simple way to add redirects to the new paths?

[bsmither]

Welcome FrankR! Glad to see you made it the forums.

Re: Canada Post -- Be advised this module follows CP's requirement that rate requests be made through port 30000. If you are already using CP, then one must conclude your current hosting provider is allowing comms on port 30000 to pass through the firewall. If you plan on moving hosts, keep this in mind.

Re: the .html suffix -- I do not foresee any difficulty in making two tweaks: the .htaccess rewrite rules will need to look for .html and allow for its omission, Yes, the .htaccess can have rewrite rules that will bounce a 301 for URLs that are missing .html to a URL thas has .html (similar to insisting www. when it is missing). Also, a small tweak can have CubeCart generate URLs that do not have the .html suffix.

[FrankR]

Thank you for the welcome.

I am hosting this software on my web server so my plan for migration would be to set up a new store with a clean installation and then change to the live store's subdomain once the new store is operational.  However, I am currently using the USPS for shipping for a few reasons, one of which is that the OpenCart's Canada Post module is an extra-cost extension.

It is good to know that CubeCart's .html extension for products won't be an issue.  I will need some help with the .htaccess rewrite rules or the CubeCart code tweak.  If the site can work with or without html as a URL extension, what was the reason for using it?

I was previously using a CRELoaded store and it had dynamic, SEO-unfriendly urls.  I am sure that I'm not the only one who has changed product URLs over the years so it would be useful if CubeCart had a URL redirect manager to prevent dead links.

I just upgraded to the latest version of OpenCart today so I'll have to see if that fixes the issue that I have not previously been able to resolve.

[bsmither]

" it would be useful if CubeCart had a URL redirect manager "

Not as a stock function, and no plugin that I am aware of. However, regardless of the name of the product, nor the name of the category it is a member of, you can specify a custom friendly URL for the products, the categories, and the documents.

[FrankR]

I was thinking of a feature like this for preventing dead links:

https://docs.joomla.org/Help36:Components_Redirect_Manager

[Noodleman]

you can quite easily add those directly into your stores .htaccess file. The module you linked to simply offers a friendly admin page to make those edits, rather than adding the code directly to the file.

[bsmither]

Perhaps even the hosting account's control panel may have an app for managing redirects.

[FrankR]

I've upgraded my OpenCart site to the latest version and the annoying problem I've been having with it wasn't resolved.  CubeCart also has a few built-in features that OpenCart does not have so I'm going to try CubeCart first on my car club's site (only has 4 products) and likely  zero backlinks.

I've installed CubeCart v6.1.0 and I'm configuring the site.  For minimize dead links, I can easily create the same SEO URLs for each product and category.  OpenCart allows 2 paths for each product: including the category path and without .  For example: /events/car-show and /car-show, depending upon the referring page.

CubeCart appears to only allow one product SEO URL and, if I wanted to include the category, that would have to be specified in the product's SEO URL.  Hardcoding the category into the product SEO url would mean more work if I wanted to change a product's category although I have my doubts that this would happen.

Either way, it looks like I'm for both a tweak to CubeCart's code to delete the html suffix and to the htaccess file.  Can you point me to the procedures for doing each?

Is there a good reason to leave the html category/product suffix as-is and instead have 2 htaccess redirects?

[ayz1]

In admin go to Store Settings and look on the Search Engines section. In there is a setting to Add category to product URL path - is this what you are looking for?

[bsmither]

CC will add the html suffix, so please do not include that in the Custom SEO URL Path.

You bring up an interesting point -- it would solve some problems if each product/category could have any number of Custom URL Paths.

CubeCart is a bit pingy-pongy on how it is determined which product to show. But as long as one SEO URL is the main phrase, it should work.

Interesting to note that adding a translation to a Category also gives you the opportunity to add Search Engine Custom SEO URL for that translation. But the same opportunity is not shown for adding Search Engine Custom SEO URL when adding a translation to a Product.

[FrankR]

14 hours ago, ayz1 said:

In admin go to Store Settings and look on the Search Engines section. In there is a setting to Add category to product URL path - is this what you are looking for?

I am using the default settings (don't recall changing them) and I have:

• Add category to product URL path?  > Top Level and all subcategories
• Add subcategories to category URL path?  > Yes

It looks like this setting affects how CC auto-generates the product's SEO URL if the field is left blank.  Even if there are multiple categories selected for a product, CC uses the Primary category to generate the SEO URL.

The advantage I see for including a particular category path in the SEO URL is that, if there are multiple possible products of interest to the placed product link's audience, it is easy to back up through the path to see that category's entire products.  For example, my car show ticket product could also appear in a locations category.  That product path could then appear as

• /city1/car-show
• /events/car-show

The way it works now, even I specify multiple categories and arrive at the product through a non-primary category path, the CC's breadcrumb path jumps from the alternative category path to the the primary category path once the product is selected.

From what I can tell so far, there isn't any advantage in having the html suffix on a product path.  Perhaps the option to include it could be a future feature.  In the meantime, how do I tweak CC's code to prevent from appearing?

[disco_ii_disco]

I have just done a similar thing and the tweak you require is in the classes/seo.class.php file.

Around line 47, remove the.html text from:

private $_extension   = '.html';

Or even better though, add the following code snippet in admin > manage hooks > code snippets.

<?php

$this->_extension = '';

?>

with the trigger set to: class.seo.construct

[bsmither]

Please keep in mind that the URL Rewrite rules in .htaccess is expecting to see the .html suffix.