Redirecting an old link - menus, pages, etc.
Ferguson
Registered Users Posts: 1,345 Major grins
I suspect this has come up before but can't find the right search terms...
I have a link used on a popular site that points to an old gallery location. Let's call in me.com/events/x
I rearranged, and am having trouble getting them to repoint to the right location, e.g. me.com/events/stuff/y. Yes both the subdirectory and galley changed (I could change gallery back but that's not the issue).
So what I did was create a page at me.com/events/x that has a few words, and a link to me.com/events/stuff/y.
All well and good, works fine, people are finding the gallery again (and the owner of the site says "we're trying to get our hosting company to change; sigh).
So... the problem is that me.com/events is in a drop down menu, with the option turned on to build subdirectory items as links. Including the page (not just folders).
So my top level menu is showing this dummy page.
If I make it unlisted it stops appearing -- but it also stops being found by the vanilla link me.com/events/x.
And since the menu is a sub-item not the top level, I can't edit it in the drop down menu object.
Am I missing something? IS there some way to make this go away? Either:
- Some way to control what sub-menu items are listed?
- Some way to say "show folders, galleries but not pages"?
- Some way to say "never show pages" would even be fine?
- Some way on an unlisted page to make it be possible to refer to it by its name/URL even if unlisted (but without the secret code on the end)?
What's really needed is redirects after reorganization -- when someone reorganizes their folders in Smugmug, say to take advantage of the additional levels... how does one keep old links still working?
I have a link used on a popular site that points to an old gallery location. Let's call in me.com/events/x
I rearranged, and am having trouble getting them to repoint to the right location, e.g. me.com/events/stuff/y. Yes both the subdirectory and galley changed (I could change gallery back but that's not the issue).
So what I did was create a page at me.com/events/x that has a few words, and a link to me.com/events/stuff/y.
All well and good, works fine, people are finding the gallery again (and the owner of the site says "we're trying to get our hosting company to change; sigh).
So... the problem is that me.com/events is in a drop down menu, with the option turned on to build subdirectory items as links. Including the page (not just folders).
So my top level menu is showing this dummy page.
If I make it unlisted it stops appearing -- but it also stops being found by the vanilla link me.com/events/x.
And since the menu is a sub-item not the top level, I can't edit it in the drop down menu object.
Am I missing something? IS there some way to make this go away? Either:
- Some way to control what sub-menu items are listed?
- Some way to say "show folders, galleries but not pages"?
- Some way to say "never show pages" would even be fine?
- Some way on an unlisted page to make it be possible to refer to it by its name/URL even if unlisted (but without the secret code on the end)?
What's really needed is redirects after reorganization -- when someone reorganizes their folders in Smugmug, say to take advantage of the additional levels... how does one keep old links still working?
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He Ferguson,
Can you please send me a PM with the site and the exact pages, galleries and menus you are referring to? Thanks!
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I sent a PM, but I will post here as well. I was trying to simplify the question but perhaps the use of dummy links makes it less obvious.
Site: http://www.CaptivePhotons.com
At the top see the menu bar. Click on "Sports/Events" and look at the very bottom at "Forwarding Link".
This comes from:
Page: http://www.CaptivePhotons.com/Events/Medieval-Faire-Lakes-Park-2010
Originally that address was a gallery, and all of my events were inter-mixed, i.e. Events was a category (fold) and galleries were inside of it. I then added a separate layer with subcategories (sub folders) so that Events/Medieval-Faires was a folder containing galleries, including the one referenced.
On the sponsors site (which I can't control, and apparently they don't know how to control) they have numerous links to:
http://www.CaptivePhotons.com/Events/Medieval-Faire-Lakes-Park-2010
They were broken when I added sub-folders, so I wanted to redirect them. The only way I could find to redirect was to make that address a page, and on that page provide the redirection.
That worked OK, and is a perfectly acceptable solution EXCEPT that it is annoying that it appears in the drop down menu. I removed it from the folder's page (e.g. www.CaptivePhotons.com/Events itself) by just removing "pages" as an item on it -- which is fine.
But it's automatically included into the drop down menu links, and I don't see a real option for changing that. It's not terrible, but it is a bit confusing to see that "Forwarding Link" there.
But this begs the much larger question of broken links. For years I have given out links to galleries; nice understandable URL's. But the URl's are directly associated with organization, and if I change folder structure (such as this) they all break.
Is there a more appropriate mechanism to redirect such links? I'm actually happy to track the ones that are relevant and put in redirects (including ensuring there is no ambiguity between old links and new), but there's no mechanism that I know of for doing them? Is there?
I don't object if the issue is really "can't be done", but why bother asking for details and then no followup?