How to make Apache 301 redirects a little less messy?
How Do I?
Long standing bugbear… dealing with .htaccess 301s on an ordinary LAMP set-up. Anyone have any knowledge how to make 301 redirects with ExpressionEngine a little less messy? Standard 301 redirect example:
301 /old_template_group/ example.com/new_template_group/The resulting URL looks like this:
example.com/new_template_group/?/old_template_group/I’d like to remove the ?/old_template_group/ part of this url… thoughts?
I can cover SEO issues with canonical URLS but from a user/sharing point of view it’s not ideal. Also not sure if this might affect the {last_segment} operator (although I suspect the ? character mitigates that concern…).
This is definitely a challenge.. Here’s what I’ve done for a long time to try to clean that up (though it still leaves a trailing ?)
Redirect 301 /activeoznz https://www.domain.com/destinations/new-zealand?
Though, I’ve largely (almost completely) switched to using Detour Pro to handle this stuff. Three big wins:
- In-CP editing, no .htaccess or other things that could break the site.
- Perfectly clean URL, every time.
- Detour Pro adds a lot of additional options for wildcards and pattern matching, and it counts the number times the redirects are used, so you can see how popular old links still are