Hi!

I am working in a project where we will very soon need to create a huge number of 301 redirects as we migrate 150+ websites from an old proprietary CMS to their new equivalents on a big new DNN installation. I've done this on some smaller projects where I used Screaming Frog to identify the top 30 or so most popular pages and redirected them to the new versions of those pages using the IIS URL Rewriter, which ends up creating all the rules in the site's web.config file. 

However, in this case, with so many sites, if I end up creating even 30 rules for each of the sites, that's several thousand lines in a single web.config to be parsed by each visit to the site?? Even if that's not a performance hit, it will be tough to manage them all in a single place like that.

So I was looking for some type of DNN Module that would allow me to create all the redirects for each portal at the portal level instead. I was thinking maybe a feature of the new Advanced URL Management would be able to do that, but it seems like it is more about providing custom friendly URLs and rewrites for visits to existing pages than about redirecting old legacy URLs from a different site to their new counterparts.

I thought I found the answer on CodePlex, where there's a Bruce Chapman project that is a "DNN Url Redirect Extension Provider" that seems like it would allow me to create all these in a database table instead of the web.config - seems ideal! I've installed and configured according to the instructions, but I haven't been able to get that to work yet in my dev environment, and the comments on the project seem inactive.

Anyone run into a similar problem or have any suggestions for the best way to proceed? My time is running out! :)

Thanks! David

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for your suggestion! I'm in there now looking at the TabUrls table - it looks like this is what underlies the CustomURL feature.

I can see where this would definitely save some time if I can import a large number of URLs into here directly instead of visiting and configuring each page's Custom URL interface. But I'm still a bit shaky on whether this will serve the purpose of redirecting legacy URLs from the old system, plus it would really be nice to have the flexibility to use some RegEx patterns for many of the cases where a query string has to be translated to a new value or format.

For example, just working directly in the interface, I tried adding this as a custom URL:

/localweb/co/denver/microsoft-word-training.aspx

in the Custom URL for the tab at this final URL:

/Training-and-Certifications/Microsoft-Office/Word (I set it as a 301.)

I've cleared the cache and even recycled the App Domain but when I attempt to visit the redirected domain, it only redirects back to the home page in our internal environment. When I test in a staging environment, I just get the 404 page.

Of course I certainly may be doing something incorrect in my setup! Thanks again for any clarification or further suggestions!