One For The Joomla Boys??

This is driving me insane, utterly insane!

WARNING:
This is Long & Complicated!

So I've been using Joomla for ages and recently after a server move had to replace my SEF URL component as it's not compatible with the new server config to SEF Advance. After an initial few Gremlins which were purely down to me having the wrong configuration settings all is working nicely.

Throughout all of this time I have had what I called a blog which was purely a section called Blog with various catagories in it. In other words these were really just normal Joomla articles as there were no trackbacks or other such features normally associated with a 'true' blog.

As I want to develop my blog further and turn it into a 'real' blog I decided to invest in a proper Blog component called My Blog (you have to buy it).

When I installed My Blog I set it to manage my existing Blog section so that I didn't have to recreate all the content again. Tighten you belts, this is where it gets complicated.

Remember that at this stage I have SEF Advance enabled and SEO enabled in Global Settings

I installed this component 2 days ago and immediately after I installed it I noticed the following:

If I clicked on any Read More link at the bottom of any article all I got was this error message:

Cannot find the entry.The user has either change the permanent link or the content has not been published.

I also noticed that none of the URL's within the My Blog component where SEF one's.

Thinking that SEF Advance may be the cause I disabled it AND turned of SEO in Global Settings and tried again.

Remember ALL SEF URL's are turned off

When I clicked on the Read More I still got the Cannot find entry... error message. To make sure that this wasnt a cache problem I tried the same link on another computer. Same thing.

At this point I gave up and went to bed but before I did I turned on all SEF URL's again.

Okay so with SEF turned on or off Read More links simply weren't working. Therefore this is a My Blog problem surely? Read on.

SEF is now enabled
The next day I go back to my website and find that suddenly, without changing anything I was able to access the Read More links even though the URL's werent SEF. I tried this on 3 seperate computers and they all worked. But no, suddenly after about 10 minutes it all stopped working again and I was back to getting the Cannot find entry.... error message. Huh? How is that possible. I didn't do anything, didn't change any config settings, it just stopped working all by itself.

I then disable SEF again
I try again and find that when I now click on the Read More links I get taken back to my home page showing just the intro text still of the article I wanted to read the whole of except that the URL it uses (remember SEF is disabled) is very weird looking e.g.

www.peakoverload.com/option,com_myblog/show,A-RAW-Deal.html/Itemid,49.html

Also all images contained on these articles now appear as broken links

Now that URL don't look right to me! option,com?? what's with all the commas? and where is it getting the .html suffix from and why is it appearing twice?

So it's a caching problem then? Read on.

I did some digging around on the SEF Advance and My Blog support forums and found a number of people who had got the two working. I then found that there is an extension that you can add to SEF Advance that makes it generate SEF URL's with My Blog. Great! So I download it and place the file in the correct directory (the root of the My Blog component folder). Sure enough as soon as I click on the Blog link in the menu I can see that the URL's are SEF. HOWEVER what also happens is that any modules on the left or right totally dissapear and there is no way I can make them come back. Also when I now click on the Read More links I once again get the Cannot find entry.... error message.

So I remove the extension and I'm back to getting the Cannot find entry.... error message. when I click on the Read More links.

At this point I give up and go to bed

So it's a SEF Advance problem then? Read On.

Today.

SEF Enabled, Extension removed
So this current configuration should produce exactly the same results as before as nothing has changed. In other words I should get the Cannot find entry.... error message. when I click on the Read More links. Oh no. Now it's all working properly, with the exception of the fact that the URL's are not SEF. So far I've tried to make it fall over for about 30 minutes (remember it was working for a while the other day but then stopped) and have tried accessing it with 3 computers at the same time but so far it seems to be working.

However.

If I then re-install the SEF Advance extension I'm back to loosing all my modules and when I click on the Read More links I get the Cannot find entry.... error message. Disable it and My Blog works (for the time being) but no SEF URL's.

WTF is going on? Is this a caching problem, maybe on the server, is it a My Blog problem, is it a server configuration problem, is it a SEF Advance problem? It's the sheer randomness of it and the fact that it basically contradicts itself in that one day one set of settings produce x result and the next day they produce y that confuses the hell out of me.