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Review of the SerrBizSEF SEF URL Extension

Oct 17 2007

Review of the SerrBizSEF SEF URL Extension

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

Background

SerrBizSEF is created by Michael Zittel and his team at Serr.biz in New York City. The company has been around since 1999 but this is their first publicly available Joomla component.

What Do the URLs Look Like?

/news.html
/links/index.html
/faq/examples.html

How Do I Set Up This Option?

You can find complete installation instructions by clicking here.

Support

Personally, I've found that support for SerrBizSEF is great. Michael is very active on the Joomla forums and quick to reply to emails.

Development

New features are being added. Support for other components is currently provided when a client pays for development.

Supported Components

The free component only supports Joomla itself. If you pay $19.95 to upgrade, you'll have access to files for Virtuemart, Community Builder, HotProperty, DeepPockets, RD Sitemap, Jomcomment and DSyndicate.

Advantages

Its simple. It allows users to add unique metatitles and pagetitles to each page. Some of our clients are often confused by the sheer range of option available with sh404SEF, Artio and even SEF Advanced. The small configuration screen will be an advantage to less experienced users.
Produces a list of all your URLs. This is a great bonus, because you can easily sort through all the URLs on your site and edit URLs. See the gallery at the bottom of the post to see how this works.
Key features all in place. I wouldn't consider using any SEF URL solution without 404 error pages and automapping. SerrBizSEF has both.
Nice metadata features. SerrBizSEF makes it very easy to create unique metadata including the HTML title.
Its GPL. Open source code and GPL licensing. Sounds good to me.

Disadvantages

Its not free unless you're using Joomla without addons. Its $19.99 which is a very reasonable price but when you consider the number of supported components is limited and the fact that support isn't included in that price, it does reduce the benefit to clients seeking an easy option.
No flexibility in automatic endings. SerrBiz allows .html only, although Michael plans to improve this soon.
Lacks a lot of the extra fuctionality of Artio, Open SEF and SEF Advance. That is completely understandable - the component is only 2 months old. However, if you're seeking non-www to www redirects, using the title or alias for URLs, removing sections / categories, debugging or a long list of other advanced features, you'll need another component.

Overall Impression

I don't think its fair to contrast a new component to its much older rivals. To me, SerrBiz can serve a different market to the others. If you're looking for a component with a wide range of features and supported components then SEF Advance and sh404SEF are still the market leaders. However, overall I was very pleasantly surprised by SerrBizSEF.

When would I use it? Its likely that I'd use SerrBizSEF for clients that want a very easy-to-understand option. If they have a relatively small site without 3rd party components, I'd feel comfortable using SerrBizSEF.

Caveats: Currently, I've only used SerrBizSEF on our testing sites. If some of you have used it on live sites and particularly sites with a reasonable amount of traffic, please feel free to post your experiences in the comments section.