I’m thinking about using EE for a client with a very large amount of content currently in static pages. Over the years their URL conventions have changed, and it seems logical to completely overhaul the URLs at the moment that the content is imported. Nevertheless many of their pages are linked externally and they would rather that those links continue to function rather than return 404s. My idea is that when I’m coding up some scripts to import their old content, I’d have the legacy URL or an article stored in an (indexed) custom field. EE would then search that field for a match before returning a 404. Is that something that sounds possible?

I’m sure there must be a more elegant solution to this problem—does anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks,
Rob

You’ll want to look into mod_rewrite. More power with less (well, that’s somewhat iffy, OK) hassle.

..as Ingmar said, mod_rewrite is probably the best solution.

Otherwise you could do as you said and add some php code to the
EE 404-template that redirects the visitor to the correct EE article,
if the corresponding url is found in a custom field. It’s doable.

best
:: andy