Routing

To make Joomla! respond appropriately to a request the application contains a JRouter object. This object determines the direction to take through the application. This is based on URI query values. To make Joomla! URIs friendlier, it can be set up to use SEF (Search-Engine Friendly) URIs.

In order to take advantage of SEF URIs, when we render any URI we need to use the JRoute::_() method. This method converts normal URIs into SEF URIs; this will only happen if the component we are trying to link to has a router and the SEO options are enabled. In this example we parse the URI 'index.php?option=com_myExtension& category=3&item=6' into an SEF URI.