Search Engine Friendly Urls

Overview
Maian Cart supports search engine friendly urls via mod_rewrite. For this to function correctly, your server MUST support .htaccess and mod_rewrite.

To enable search engine friendly urls, enable the following option in your settings:

System > General Settings > Enable Search Engine Friendly URLs
and then rename the htaccess_COPY.txt file to .htaccess:

Note the period symbol (or dot) before the file. This is required!

If your server doesn`t support this feature and you enable it, you could see a '500 Internal Server Error' or a '404 Page Not Found' message. If this is the case, disable this option and remove the '.htaccess' file.

Finally, if you install to a directory that already contains a .htaccess file, you may need to copy the directives from Maian Cart into this file.
Re-Write Base Rule
Some servers require a RewriteBase rule to be in place in the .htaccess file. If you have enabled search engine friendly urls and you see a 404 and your server DOES support mod_rewrite, this could be the problem, especially if your store is not in your web root. If this is the case, uncomment the RewriteBase rule line in the .htaccess file. This adjustment may require the inclusion of your installation directory, depending on where the system is installed. Valid examples are:

RewriteBase /
RewriteBase /cart/
RewriteBase http://www.example.com/cart/
Custom Url Slugs
For products, categories and new pages, custom slugs can be set in your admin area. If a custom slug isn`t set, the system will create one automatically from the category or product name etc. It is recommended you add your own custom slugs if enabling this feature. For example, you may be selling 'watches' and you enter 'watches' as your custom slug. Your store url would look similar to the following:

http://www.example.com/category/1/1/watches
This is similar to wordpress. The 1/1 is category ID and page number.
Advanced Users ONLY
For certain urls, english text will be used in the url and you may wish to change it. For example, consider the following url:

http://www.example.com/category/1/1/watches
'watches' would be from your custom slug, but 'category' is default. To change this edit the rewrite class file>

control/classes/class.rewrite.php
In the case of 'category', change the following in the first array:

'cat' => 'category',
Enter your own value. DO NOT change the key, in this case 'cat'. So your new text might look like this:

'cat' => 'my-new-cat',
DO NOT use spaces in names as this is bad for urls. Also, forward slashes are not allowed. So, now your url would look like this:

http://www.example.com/my-new-cat/1/1/watches
If you have enabled the cache, make sure you clear it to see the changes.