The friendly 'SEF' URLs in Joomla are not always so friendly. Here's how to apply them in J1.5

It is easy to run into trouble when trying to use the Joomla SEF URLs.

So you were in the administrator / backend of your Joomla! site & you navigated to Site / Global configurations. There in SEO settings you checked yes next to Search Engine Friendly URLs .

After that things got a little messy at the front end.

This is the solution if you're on an apache server:

Simply access your into your website's home directory (ftp, if hosetd remotely) and in your home directory find the file called htaccess.txt and rename it to .htaccess (yes with a dot in front of the text).

Then back in global configurations - in the SEO settings check yes next to Use Apache mod_rewrite. Now it all should be under control, unless your host does not allow htaccess overrides.

If you get into trouble & lose access to your site – here's how to revert to old (nonSEF) URLs, go to the home directory (FTP if your site is hosted remotely) and

 var $sef = '1';
 var $sef_rewrite = '1';

to

var $sef = '0';
var $sef_rewrite = '0';