Redirects

Redirects for Migrations

In the process of migrating content into Omni CMS, there may be a number of reasons to configure redirects so users can continue to find the right content when following old links or bookmarks:

• Pages may have been renamed.
• Content may have been condensed from multiple pages.
• Duplicate content may have been discovered and removed.
• File extensions (e.g. .htm, .html, or .php) won't be used for pages on the new site.
• The old environment dictated an unwanted URL structure. (For example, sites in Toolbox generally have the name of the site after the domain [e.g. go.sdsu.edu/site].)

A spreadsheet should be created with all of the URLs from the old site in one column. The URLs from the new site should be placed in another column. This can serve multiple purposes:

• track the progress of the migration,
• ensure that pages are not overlooked in the process,
• discover patterns in the changes which might be used to generate efficient redirect rules, and
• a formula can be added to the spreadsheet to generate a one-to-one map of redirects for those pages which can't be redirected otherwise.

Prepare a list of redirects to be configured in the site's current host/CMS (if any)

If the site is currently hosted on one or more domains which will not be assigned to the site hosted in Omni CMS, it will likely be necessary to configure redirects in that environment to send users to the content's new location. For example, sites hosted on Toolbox can be accessed using go.sdsu.edu/site or newscenter.sdsu.edu/site (and other domains), so those pages will need to be redirected to the new site.

The administrators of the existing site and/or CMS should be able to provide information about how to configure redirects in that environment. In most cases, it will be possible to either configure a single redirect which sends the user to the new site using the same relative URL (e.g. oldsite.sdsu.edu/page.htm redirects to newsite.sdsu.edu/page.htm) or the redirect for each page will have to be configured individually.

Prepare a list of redirects to be configured in Omni CMS

Redirects to be configured in Omni CMS are typically those which would be requested from the domain which will host the new site after it goes live. If the old site did not have its own domain, but the new site does, there may not be many redirects to configure here. On the other hand, if the old site was hosted on multiple domains, all (or many) of which are moving to the Omni CMS environment, there may be a lot of careful work involved in getting the redirects configured properly for the new site.

When the migration is done, each page should only have one URL which is displayed when viewing that page's content. Any other URL which might be used (or may have been used in the past) to get to that content should redirect the user to that one URL.

If possible, configure and test the redirects in Omni CMS

Many types of redirects can be configured and tested within the Omni CMS environment before the site goes live. The primary issue which may make it difficult to do so would be a rule which applies only to a specific domain and can not apply to another domain (when a site will be configured to handle multiple domains). In most cases, rules can be provided which have been tested on other sites with the same requirements. If necessary, given enough advance notice, test domains may be configured to help test these types of issues.

Visit Redirects (Intranet) for more specific information about configuring redirects in Omni CMS.