So your ExpressionEngine sites URL’s have changed and you need to generate a list of 301 redirects, but what if you have hundreds, or even thousands of URL’s?
Here’s a dead simple way of generating your 301 redirect list, ready for you to paste into your .htaccess file.
Step 1 - create a template
Create a blank template. You can create the template in any template group you like, so long as you can call it from your browser.
Step 2 - add a tag or two
Open up your blank template. Now add channel entries tags for each channels’s entries you want to redirect. Here’s some basic examples:
Example 1 - for removing index.php
In this example index.php will be stripped from the URL.
{exp:channel:entries channel="mychannel"}
redirect 301 /index.php/blog/{url_title}/ {site_url}blog/{url_title}/<br>
{/exp:channel:entries} Outputs: redirect 301 /index.php/blog/entry_title/ http://mysite.com/blog/entry_title/
Example 2 - redirect to a new template group
In this example all URL’s will be redirected from /updates to /news.
{exp:channel:entries channel="mychannel"}
redirect 301 /index.php/updates/{url_title}/ {site_url}news/{url_title}/<br>
{/exp:channel:entries} Outputs redirect 301 /index.php/updates/entry_title/ http://mysite.com/news/entry_title/
Example 3 - redirect for old pages
In this example all entries that have a status of “closed” will be redirected to your home page.
{exp:channel:entries weblog="mychannel" status="closed"}
redirect 301 /index.php/site/{url_title}/ {site_url}<br>
{/exp:channel:entries}Outputs redirect 301 /index.php/site/entry_title/ http://mysite.com/
Step 3 - try it!
Save your template then call it up in your browser. If all goes well you should see the text list of 301’s that you can copy/paste into your .htaccess file.
Naturally you can use all the available channel entries attributes to refine the output, and format the URL’s however you wish using entry variables.