symlink mess with old and new resource suffix, can i write a script for that?

wondering if some1 ever made a script for this situation:

- I build a new website for a client, now client wants to have old links turned into symlinks, so far so good
- his old links vary with .html suffix or none, so I removed the suffix in the new website
- now the new links might have been indexed already so i can do 2 things afaik
- manually write .html in the aliases of the new site
- or write a script that when it encounters a resource without the .html suffix and tends to redirect a 404 to look for a resource with an alias that has the .html suffix

If your resources all have aliases to match the old site, you could either use a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file, or use a plugin with the OnPageNotFound event to load the page with the same alias.

The server passes the page requested to MODX as "q=alias.suffix", so all the plugin would need to do is to extract the alias and use that to load the correct resource.

That or create a second HTML Content Type with the extension and assign that to the SymLink Resources to cover the old Resources with a different extension. Of course, redirecting (301) all .html -> no extension maybe be better in the long run.

You probably know this, but for others, all links on the site should be in the form of link tags:



Where the number is the ID of a resource. A full link would look like this:



Once you've done that, all links on the site will work regardless of the page alias or extension.

For your SEO issue, depending on the nature of the site and the number of pages, I would be tempted to just make the home page the error page and install the LogPageNotFound extra, which will capture all attempts to visit the bad links. Then I'd use the log to create 301 rewrite rules in .htaccess for all the old links.

That way you don't need to mess with Symlinks, a plugin, or some universal rewrite rules that might have unintended consequences.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using.
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html

Doesn't the Redirector plugin do exactly that Bob?

I'm not sure I've never used it.

BTW, I think the MODX team has extended my LogPageNotFound plugin to let you automatically update the .htaccess file with rewrite rules, but I don't know if it's been released as an Extra. If not, I'll probably do it someday.



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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using.
MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html

I just set it up a few weeks ago on a site that was static with the .htm extension. I had to enter every possible page/file from the old site but fortunately there were only four pages in the first place. It seems to work rather well.