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Problem need help with new website and dead links


Ant

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We are having an agency redesign our website. Our domain name is staying the same.

 

Our website is news based so there are thousands of articles in our database.

 

They recently told us that due to a problem with upgrading to the newest version of Joomla, all our articles (that reside on other sites, shared etc )will have to be redirected to a 404 page and then to the home page.

 

Basically the new Joomla system that they upgraded us to has different link url formatting for articles. Thus they cant fix the problem.

 

Therefore all the links to our stories floating around in search results etc will be broken and not lead to the actually article.

 

 

Am I wrong to think that they should have planned for this prior to development. They told us all our current articles etc images etc will remain intact despite the move to a new server and an updated version of the current cms system.

 

Am I missing something?

 

They told me that pretty quickly all the search engines will crawl our site and re-index the articles thus the old links floating around will die off. I assume thats correct for our site but not articles hosted on other sites.

 

 

I don't want to get angry with them if what I expected to happen was impossible in the web design world.

 

It must have been possible at one point because they told us no problem all the url's and links will remain intact.

 

Thanks,

 

A.

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Ideally, they would have been able to spot this as an issue before they started development. However, I would expect that there should be some way of being able to parse the URL and redirect to the correct article. As long as your old articles had a consistent link structure, and your new articles have a consistent link structure, I would think that it might be possible to convert the two... It's possible that it could be done within Joomla itself, or perhaps as something added in the .htaccess file? This URL suggests that route: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326647/joomla-url-using-format-www-xyz-com-section-category-article

 

However, I haven't worked with Joomla, so I'm just doing some educated guesses here.

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Thanks Ben.

 

I tried searching for answers myself.

 

I feel kind of stupid offering them help considering I am not a programmer but maybe I will send them the link and see what they say.

 

They are telling me that when the database of the site gets imported to the new server, the new version of Joomla rewrites the existing database and changes the urls of the articles.

 

Thanks

A.

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