Moving articles around
Saturday, 12 June 2010It's a very common issue: Once your site is up and running - complete with a well-thought structure of sections and categories - the amount of articles grows. But because more and more articles are added, after some time the original structure might not be that logical anymore. Adding new categories and assigning old articles to them seems logical: But this leaves you with numerous 404-errors on your site. We give you the solution.
Our own tutorial-syndrom
Our own example: On Yireo we provide many diffferent tutorials, and a lot of them deal with the usage of our own extension-suite MageBridge that connects Joomla! to Magento. Because troubleshooting bridge-issues is part of the administration, we added troubleshooting docs to the Administration-category. But this makes it a lot harder to find the right troubleshooting document when you're looking for it.
So we created a new category Troubleshooting instead, and moved all the troubleshooting documents to it. But this also ment that we created a whole new set of URLs, and the old URLs became absolete. Instead of writing manual htaccess-rules we just turned to our own extension: Dynamic404.
The solution: Dynamic404
With our component Dynamic404, every 404 page can be caught and the visitor can automatically be redirected to the right page. Every redirect occurs with a HTTP Status 301, which makes the redirect search engine friendly. Dynamic404 is also able to log every 404-error as well, allowing you to cleanup links as well.
When redirecting to the right page, Dynamic404 first of all tries to match the last part of the URL with any article alias. As long as the articles alias does not change, this works like a charm - for instance when moving the same article to a new category. Only when the article alias does change, things become a bit more difficult. Dynamic404 is able to use more advanced logic trying to determine the right URL, but you might just as well just add a manual redirect to the Dynamic404 rule-set.