Help with friendly URL rewrite

[Anarasha]

Hello. I am working on fixing a webshop for a company currently, and all in all it looks to be set up really well. Great SEO, friendly URLs are running. However, several categories seem immune to the Rewrite rules.

Some categories work perfectly. Other categories add the raw URL instead, but when I go into the shop and do a preview of the item, it opens a page with a friendly URL. This means that the problem is with the categories not being affected by Rewrite, because all the items work. I have tried moving items with "bad" URLs to categories that work and then the "bad" URLs become friendly in the good category. And to cover all bases, I tried moving a "good" item to a "bad" category and that gave a "bad" URL. So I am 112% sure the issue is not with the items but with the categories. I tried creating a test category on the live page and adding from both good and bad categories and both gave bad URLs. So new categories seem to have the same problem. Attached is two screenshots - one of two categories who are equally deep in the subcategory tree(even in the same main category) and a screenshot of my current rewrite rules. I tried messing around with the rewrite rules, but I couldn't actually get it to reflect any changes. Do I need to do something special to make it apply the new rewrite rules?

I am at a loss here. I hope you can help me

[Traumflug]

Can you give a couple of names of these not working categories?

This behavior looks much like a bug. Perhaps some incompatibility with non-English characters or whatever. If I can reproduce it, I can fix it as well.

[musicmaster]

I can make nothing from those pictures. The texts are too small to read and nowhere it is indicated where on those huge pictures we should look. As Traumflug said, please supply urls and category names.

The obvious step for solving this kind of problem is looking for similarities that discern bad from good dysfunctional parent categories. But you don't provide enough information to do that. Also, did you try to rename parent categories?

[Anarasha]

@traumflug Thank you for getting back to me. Some of the non-working categories are named "Kabler, stik og adapter>Multistik>24 pol Harting - Ilme", " Kabler, stik og adapter>Multistik>4 pol Harting - Ilme" and things like it. So no non-English characters I'm afraid. But categories like " Kabler, stik og adapter>Kabler>Kabler Til Strøm>Færdig Combikabler" with non-English characters work perfectly.

@musicmaster I have no issue clicking on the pictures to enlarge them, I am sorry you had problems though. The data in the pictures can be summed up as follows: Two categories with the same parent categories, one producing perfectly reasonable SEO URLs, the other does not. Same type of category, same parents, no visible reason why. As for the other image, it had my rewrite rules. They are as follows: Route to items: {rewrite} Route to category: {rewrite} Route to category with "Selectedfilter": {rewrite}/filter{selectedfilters} Route to supplier: supplier/{rewrite} Route to manufacturer: manufacturer/{rewrite} Route to CMS page: content/{rewrite} Route to CMS category: content/category/{rewrite}

I have been unable to figure out any commom denominator for why these don't work - in the category itself, I see no differing variables between a working and a non-working category.

[Anarasha]

The problem has been found! Although it makes no sense to me.

I tried renaming a problematic categorty as per Musicmaster's suggestion. All of the categories I'm currently examining are for multi purpose plugs. They're all named something like "4 pol Harting - Ilme", "6 pol Harting - Ilme" and so on. 4 pol means a plug with 4 legs. I tried re-naming a problem category to 123 to see if starting with a number was the issue. It worked perfectly when named 123. Also, several other categories that work started with numbers. Naming the category back to the original name made the category break again, so it wasn't just the re-naming - the actual name "4 pol Harting - Ilme" created some sort of problem-. So I tried renaming the category to the name of an existing, working category and the problem went away again. Rename it back to the problem name and the problem came back again. So I tried shuffling the name so insread of "4 pol Harting - Ilme" I named it "Harting Ilme - 4 pol". This fixed the problem. The same letters, same characterse, just shuffled the position around. I have no idea why this fixed the problem and it smells like a weird bug. But I'm no programming expert, but I thought maybe this could help someone fix a similar problem.

[Traumflug]

Is it possible you have name clashes? Like two categories having the same name? Renaming one of them resolves such a problem, of course.

There's back office -> Preferences -> Duplicate URLs, which should find such duplicates.