Question

I have a menu to an external link:

Menu name: Support
Type: External Link
Link: http://www.somesite.com/support

That menu shows up in several areas of the site and it will be changing, so I wanted to make an alias to it, that way I only need to change the original:

Menu Name: Support menu example
Type: Menu Alias
Menu Alias: support-menu
Menu Lnk: Support

Problem is, the test menu gives me a 404 error, if I change it to point to a single article menu, it works great, but any menu that points to an external link gives me the error.

Here is the link I get when I hover over the alias menu:

http://www.somesite.com/?Itemid=138

I tried inputting the atual link with th eitem id and it still doesn’t work fo rthe external links, only aticles, and I verified the id #’s:

http://www.somewebsite.com/index.php?Itemid=115

Answer 1

After a quick glance through the menu component, it looks like building the links as http://www.somesite.com/?Itemid=138 is hardcoded and difficult to get around.

You could probably sidestep this a little bit by using the Redirect component of Joomla. Find http://www.somesite.com/?Itemid=138 in the component and set it to redirect to http://www.somesite.com/support. You will still have to update the link in two places if it changes (once in the menu and once in redirect) but that would be better than many places.

This is probably also a bug that should be submitted back to Joomla for improvement.