I have recently installed Joomla! 1.5 on server hosted by inmotionhosting.com. I use an 1.0 version of Joomla for another web page on a different server, and I would like to migrate to the new version of Joomla, and possibly change my web hosting company. I created the Joomla installation in a new empty directory (joomla.workingagenda.com), to play around. I did not install the sample data, but created a few dummy entries to experiment. My first problem was that I had trouble getting the search engine friendly URLs to work.

From the Joomla Global Configuration menu, I found the SEO Settings, on the right hand column. In the default installation, they are turned off.

The default SEO Settings

I tried simply changing the “Search Engine Friendly URL’s” setting from no to yes.

With search engine friendly URL's option turned to yes.

Unfortunately, this did not work with inmotionhosting.com. I received an error message, that the file was not found:

The 404 - Component not found error message

Next, I tried turning on the Use Apache mod_rewrite option.

Turning on the SEO setting for Apache mod_rewrite

This also did not work. At this point, after trying a few other things that did not work, I searched on forums, and found that I needed to look in the directory where Joomla was installed, and find the file htaccess.txt. I made a copy of this file, and renamed it .htaccess. At this point the SEF URL’s worked find, but they are a bit longer than I like.