How: Folder Redirection

Customization Hacks / Tools / Tips / Tricks
1

Hello,

We have a customer who wants Folder redirection “like they had in cpanel” :cool:

I have had a look at their htaccess file from their cpanel host (apache 1.3 obviously) and it reads:

 RedirectMatch temp ^/$ http://DOMAIN/intro

Is there any way of achieving something similar in Interworx hosted sites?
I have never done very much in htaccess as far as redirect rules etc so please bear with me.

Thanks in anticipation.

2

Currently, there isn’t a SiteWorx interface for .htaccess manipulation, but there will be in the next version. Unfortunately, until then, you’ll have to create them manually. :frowning:

Socheat

3

Helo Socheat,

Can you give some pointers on the requirements in the htaccess required to achieve this?

Cheers.

4

Sure. It’s not as intimidating as you might think.

Redirect <status> <relative_url from> <absolute_url to>

For example, say you have the SiteWorx account foo.com, with the following directories “bar” and “qwerty”:
http://www.foo.com/bar
http://www.foo.com/qwerty

Now let’s say you want www.foo.com/bar to redirect to http://www.messedup.com:
http://www.foo.com/bar -> http://www.messedup.com

The redirect for this would be:

Redirect temp /bar http://www.messedup.com

And say you wanted www.foo.com/qwerty to redirect to www.keyboards.com/qwerty
http://www.foo.com/qwerty -> http://www.keyboards.com/qwerty

The redirect for this would be:

Redirect temp /qwerty http://www.keyboards.com/qwerty

You can find more information about the different Redirect parameters here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect

That’ll explain what the <status> parameter does.

Hope that helps,
Socheat

5

Socheat,

Thanks for the help, tips & pointers - most intuitive, however I am afraid I still have a query:

The client says that in Cpanel (yeah yeah, I know) he has a folder redirection from the ROOT of domain.com to domain.com/flashintro
In the flashintro, directory there is an index page which has a flash movie on it, with a link also to skip into. that link goes back to domain.com and if they click on that, apparently it takes them back to domain.com (and presumably load index.php)

Now I am slightly sruggling to understand how this can actually work. It surely cant know if a visitor has gone to the site, then been referred by another page in the site, can it?

6

I’m pretty sure it can be done, but not using just simple redirects. Can you get at the original .htaccess file? I’d be interested to see how it was done.

Socheat

7

Hello, just for the records, I’ve found this free windows tool to be very useful to manage .htaccess files:

http://www.tlhouse.co.uk/HTAccessible.shtml

Juan