Weird Web URLs lately

[letssewllc]

Hello,

Lately for new products I have been having URLs such as: www.domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/###/s/product-name/ instead of just www.domain.com/product-name.html

I was wondering if there is a setting causing this. It is so much cleaner looking to have the second version. If I type in the second version, it leads to the 404 page. This has only been happening recently as I have a test.html product page that still works just fine.

Hopefully someone can help me out.

Thanks in advance.

[Tom Robertshaw]

The process by which the nicer URLs are generated is through URL Rewrites. There should be an index process that is run regularly to keep these in check. Could you try re-running the Magento URL Rewrite from Index Management and see if the nice URLs come back?

[letssewllc]

@Tom Robertshaw

That was another thing I was meaning to ask the boards. The Catalog URL Rewrites under Index Management says it is always processing under the status and sometimes I will see that the last updated date is showing a date from a few days before. When I try to manually run that particular index manually I get a Fatal Error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in *file name* on line ####

That happens after about 10 minutes or so of trying to index.

[Tom Robertshaw · Accepted solution]

Yeah, that confirms the problem.

Sometimes the indexing process can get stuck. It's not unusual for the indexing process to fail if it's tried to be run from admin when you have time limits on the amount of time web processes can run. It is desired to have these time limits so that run away processes don't create bad experiences for customers but it is a pain when it comes to getting the indexes to run.

Do you have SSH access to the machine? If so, you can run a full reindex by going to the root of magento and running:

php shell/indexer.php --reindexall

Another note, indexers can have one of two different modes. One is "Update on Save". The other is "Manual". Generally, I recommend setting all indexers to manual and then adding a cron task to run the indexing process on a regular basis. Every 4-6 hours is normally sufficient on community edition. 

[letssewllc]

@Tom Robertshaw

That SSH seemed to have done the trick. Thank you.

I am not going to mess with Cron or anything that requires more knowledge than I have right now, but I will keep it in mind as I learn more.

[Tom Robertshaw]

No problem. 

[BookReader]

I had a similar issue in enterprise. Accept that those funky viewid urls were getting added to my redirect manager. I'd have to manually delete them out. Magento support had me change this setting: Admin > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations to "Category - Product - Redirect."

I'm still monitoring the change in production.