Thread

I’m updating a site that is made up simply of about 20 .html pages, all in the root folder.

I’m wondering how people deal with this in EE. Do you just do a .htaccess redirect of the old urls to the new ones, or rewrite the urls with .html at the end via .htaccess, or can .html be appended via the Pages module?

Thanks for any tips. 😊

Personally, I’d put all static content into channel entries, create dynamic templates, etc.

But if you’re trying to save time and this is a low-budget thing where editing the files will not be necessary you could put those static files into the /system/expressionengine/templates/default_site/your_home_group.group/ folder and correct the links, then you could at least cut off the .html from the pages.

Thanks for your reply, hd.

Personally, I’d put all static content into channel entries, create dynamic templates, etc.

Yep, that’s what I’m planning to do. I was really just wondering what people do in terms of not ending up with a lot of 404 errors when the page urls change. As I said, they are are .html pages at the moment.

My plan was to use .htaccess to redirect each of the old urls to the new EE ones, but was wondering if there’s a preferred solution. I’m not sure if you can simply write .html as part of the url with the Pages module. I’m not really keen on that anyway.

I do .htacess redirects to the new articles - with the permanent code - and leave them up for at least a year.

It has worked out well - I did it with at least 100 articles…....google has done a fine job with it.

Thanks for your reply, handyman. That’s probably what I’ll end up doing too. 😉

Note that google (and I assume other search engines) seem to have gotten very smart about this stuff. I have checked my logs and I don’t see a lot of requests coming in for the old documents after a relatively short period of time.

In the “old” days, we used to think the internet was forever. Now I see it can come and go in a month!
😊

I have checked my logs and I don’t see a lot of requests coming in for the old documents after a relatively short period of time.

Interesting! Thanks for that feedback.

I’ve noticed lately, that Google’s crawling has been much faster than it used to be. It’s not unusual for me to make a page change, and see that reflected in Google within under a half hour. I have no idea how. Perhaps using analytics helps with their crawling now?