In the process of designing a new template for my employers site, I have set up a separate menu and assigned a the new template to that menu. I also made sure to assign the old template to the old menu so there was no confusion. Well...we have confusion. The problem I am having is that now with the new menu in place, the old menu/template is giving the wrong url alias when viewing an item from a categories blog layout. So for example:

old menu/template url looks like this

categories view:
mydomain.com/local-news/sports/

should point to:
mydomain.com/local-news/sports/4622-article-1

instead points to:

mydomain.com/new-sports/item/4622-article-1

In old-menu parent/childs looks like this

local-news
|_sports
|_|_city-1
|_|_city-2
|_|_city-3

In the new menu sports is a menu root item and looks like this

sports
|_city-1
|_city-2
|_city-3

My K2 Categories are set as follows:

local-news
|_sports
|_|_city-1
|_|_city-2
|_|_city-3

I'm a little bit of a stranger to K2, so what am I possibly doing wrong?

For the first part where you need the menu url to be mydomain.com/local-news/sports/ but instead it is mydomain.com/new-sports/item/4622-article-1

From the second link I presume that the new-sports is the menu item of the category. In order for it to be local-news you should change its alias from the menu. Then you will need a sub-menu item right below the new-sports menu item that will be called sports and will target the item you currently fetch.

So far it is a menu structure issue.

Now your categories issue is that you don't see the parent category but only the subcategory and so on?

Why does you new menu's alias need to be just "news" and you don't also name it "local-news" like you have the old alias? Maybe I'm missing something.

Tim Willford wrote: Right, but I have new alias' in the new menu compared to the old menu structure maybe it would be better to show you how i need this to work like this

k2 category	old menu alias path	new menu alias path
local-news	local-news	news
local-news|_sports	local-news/sports	sports
local-news|_schools	local-news/schools	schools

The exact problem that I am having is that the category view from the old menu is pointing to the alias' of the new menu and ignoring the alias'

Does this make better sense now?

so in otherwords domain.com/local-news/sports/k2-item is ignoring the menu item alias' and sending the viewer to domain.com/news/k2-item which is a problem because the new menu is for the new template which is not ready to go live yet :)

The reason for the alias change is that we are trying to simply the menu structure. Should be irrelevant to the problem though, I've never had this problem using the joomla core component.

Are you using a sub-domain or working on the live site itself?

If you are working on the same site it means that you have two menu items pointing to the same category this cannot be avoided. Joomla menu mechanism always fetches the latest menu item (recent ID) pointing to the category as the default menu link to that category and it ignores all other menu items.

so if i install something like the virtual domain plugin, and work off a subdomain will this give me a work around? Or because I am working off the same installation i will have a problem still?


***SOLVED*** I installed and configured virtual domains and working from a sub domain worked.