Expression Engine 2 301 redirect old template grou

Question

I thought this would be pretty simple, however I am having issues permanently redirecting an old template group to a new one.

I have www.domain.co.uk/weddings which needs to be directed to www.domain.co.uk/more-weddings.

Both template groups exist, not sure if I need to delete the old one too? Or any other settings in the template preferences?

Here's what I have been trying to use:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/weddings\$ http://www.domain.co.uk/more-weddings

I have a load more redirects which are working too, does this new one need to be placed above them?

Answer 1

You could enable PHP in the older template (weddings/index) and place this in it:

<?php
    header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
    header('Location: http://www.domain.co.uk/more-weddings');
    exit();
?>

Answer 2

When writing mod_rewrite rules, the rules get applied in the order that they appear.

In your case, you'd want your RedirectMatch to appear before any other rewrite rules — this is especially true if you're removing index.php from your ExpressionEngine URLs.

In your example, if you only want to redirect a certain directory (i.e. an ExpressionEngine template group), the following rule will do so, while allowing the rest of the site to function normally:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Only Matching Directories
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(weddings|weddings/.*)$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/more-weddings/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Make sure this rule appears before your removal of index.php (example below):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Only Matching Directories
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(weddings|weddings/.*)$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/more-weddings/$1 [R=301,L]

    # Removes ExpressionEngine index.php from URLs
    RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

If you want Google and other crawlers to see your content as temporarily moved (Response code 302, the default) or permanently moved (301), be sure to configure the RewriteRule Flags appropriately.