#109 Posted in ‘Route 66’

Latest post by Lefteris Kavadas on Tuesday, 20 February 2018 14:59 EET

Dave Burstein
Lefteris

I bought the package to automate dealing with titles after I was hacked and moved the site. It was also time to get rid of the index.php, which I had been meaning to fix for years but didn't want to disturb my google and other links. The site was and is fastnet.news. Happy to send a login if useful.
I was hacked in nasty way - .php insertions kept coming back even after I cleaned in many ways and tested with sucuri.net. So I created a new, clean, joomla site with 3.8.5. I brought all my articles (100's) in successfully with j2xml. (The article numbers need fixing.) Great - now all the articles are there, but the links are the problems.

On the restoration of the old site, http://jbdb.org/oldfnn/index.php/cable/641-gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes is the article link with legacy mode in the integration.

On the new site, I have http://fastnet.news/index.php/cable/7-gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes

I know the article number is different and I have to fix that.

The question I'm asking is how to use your software to get rid of the index.php/cable while having a redirect for Google's old links. I'm happy with any simple format, such as just the article name.

Can you point me to the best way to do that, especially the redirect for the old links?

Help appreciated
Dave Burstein

Lefteris Kavadas
Hi,

In order to get rid of the index.php part you only need to set "Use URL Rewriting" to "Yes" under Joomla global configuration. I checked your site, and since you are using Apache web server, you also need to rename the file htaccess.txt to .htaccess. This file is bundled with Joomla, you should find it at the root of your site. This is a requirement for URLs rewriting.

After that, the index.php will be removed. Now you are ready to fix your links. Route 66 allows you to define any pattern you like for your URLs. In general, short URLs are ranked better. So you can try to use only the article alias to your URLs. The setup is very simple and you can always refer to the documentation page at https://www.firecoders.com/documentation/route-66.

Regarding the redirect part, it's always better to do it in the web server layer, not the application. You can set this to the Apache config but this requires regular expressions skills.

An other option is to set the redirects in the "Redirects" component in Joomla. But this requires to set a redirect for every single article.

The last, and probably the fastest solution is to fix your article IDs. In that case you will have to create a menu link structure as your previous site ( in order to have the /cable part ). Then you can use any pattern you wish for your URLs and Route 66 will redirect automatically the old links to the new ones.

I know that this may sounds complicated but it's not. Let me know if you need more help, or you have any questions. I will be more than happy to help you.

Regards

Dave Burstein
Thank you for this. Can you point me to the specific information on how to make sure "use any pattern you wish for your URLs and Route 66 will redirect automatically the old links to the new ones."

Help appreciated. Dave

Lefteris Kavadas
What I mean is actually keep your current URLs structure ( by correcting the article IDs ) and then set a pattern at the Route 66 options. In that case your new URLs will be different but Route 66 will perform redirects automatically.
To break things down:

1. Make sure you have the exact same URLs:

Old site: http://jbdb.org/index.php/cable/641-gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes
New site: http://fastnet.news/index.php/cable/641-gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes

2. Then set any pattern you wish at Route 66. For example setting the pattern {articleAlias} will make Route 66 to generate the URLs based only on the alias:

http://fastnet.news/gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes

In that case, Route 66 will redirect automatically

from
http://fastnet.news/index.php/cable/641-gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes

to
http://fastnet.news/gigabit-broadband-downstream-available-to-50m-u-s-homes

In order to define the URL pattern you wish just navigate to Components->Route 66 on your Joomla site administration area.

Let me know if you have more questions.

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