On 21 July 2006 I updated www.therandymon.com from Joomla 1.04 to 1.10.  In
about the same time period I built a completely new site,
http://www.gotonicaragua.com.  This article looks at both sites simultaneously
because the latter was installed with 1.10.  Custom Graphics My first problem
was that in updating to 1.10 Fantastico overwrote some of my custom template
configurations, which was annoying but not unexpected, and was easily corrected
by re-uploading my saved files from my backup server.  That included my
favicon.ico and several custom graphics.

HTACCESS A more vexing problem was what Joomla calls "SEO" or Search
engine optimization.  Joomla 1.04 didn't have a problem with this but Joomla
1.1.0 ships with a broken HTACCESS file that doesn't allow the Apache server to
rewrite URLs correctly, and upon turning it on my entire site broke.  OK,
breathe deeply and start digging around to see what changed.

An afternoon's worth of Googling found me examples of HTACCESS files that work,
and in comparing them to my own I was able to figure out that mine needed to
look like the following:


 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see
notes## #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\\.htm|\\.php|\\.html|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
#


Modifying some of the other settings in Joomla's included HTACCESS file made
things worse, not better, which helped point out the direction in which my
research needed to travel.  This was an annoying and vaguely unforgivable
problem, the kind of bug beta testing should have identified.  But life goes
on.