Support of SEF URLs
SEF is an abbreviation for "Search engine friendly". SEF URLs are human-readable or clean URLs that make sense to both humans and search engines because they explain the path to the particular page they point to. For example, in Joomla a standard non-SEF URL looks like this:
http://website.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&catid=2&Itemid=101
While a SEF URL may look as follow:
http://website.com/my-map
SEF URLs have a better look and have a positive impact to get higher SEO ranking for your website.
The standard Map widget doesn't support SEF URLs. Any URL that you put inside the Content area or a Link of any item will never be processed by the SEF (router) plugin, i.e. the URL will always be displayed "as is". See the screenshot below:
In this case above the rendered widget will have non-SEF URLs, because they are not supported by the original Yootheme widget:
This problem is solved with the MapEx widget that supports SEF URLs natively. You don't need to set any special settings for the MapEx widget to activate the SEF URLs: generation of SEF URLs is solely done and is controlled only by the SEF plugin that you are using.
The MapEx widget works with any SEF plugin (router) that is responsible for generating SEF URLs. For Joomla, the MapEx has been tested with the following plugins: