A Complete Guide to 404SEF with Joomla

If you’ve installed 404SEF and gotten it to work you might find that it still seems to mess up sometimes. You assign a module to a page but that page is not always associated with that menu item. The module therefore doesn’t show up.
Actually it’s Joomla that’s jumping all over the place, 404SEF is just going along for the ride.
Let’s go through everything required to make 404SEF work, including when Joomla keeps renaming pages.

1. Install 404SEF as a component
2. modify .htaccess as per below
3. Turn on SEO in Global Configuration
4. Turn on 404SEF in 404SEF Configuration
5. If a module shows up sometimes but not others, and it appears that 404SEF is renaming a page every time it’s loaded, make that page static using the Content/Static Content Manager (create new static content and delete old dynamic content).

## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
# Options FollowSymLinks
#
# mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
# Uncomment following line if your webserver’s URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla/MamboDirectory (just / for root)
# RewriteBase /
########## Begin Standard SEF Section
## ALL (RewriteCond) lines in this section are only required if you actually
## have directories named ‘content’ or ‘component’ on your server
## If you do not have directories with these names, comment them out.
#
#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
#
########## End Standard SEF Section
########## Begin 3rd Party or Core SEF Section
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional – see notes##
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
#
########## End 3rd Party or Core SEF Section