I am surprised that this was so hard to find and yet so simple to do. I have always been so worried about changing the menu structure on my Joomla! site. This is because of the possibility of search engine links/back links to my site could get broken if I do. So what is the answer? You could go with sh404SEF or Artio JoomSEF or any other of the extensions listed at http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef. However, many of these are overkill for a simple redirect.
That’s why I went with JRedirect. It is a very simple plugin that you “set and forget.” It is as easy to use as it is to install and gets the job done beautifully. I needed to redirect http://www.mysite.com/students/the-forum.html to it’s new URL of http://www.mysite.com/forum.html. I tried using sh404SEF as well as Artio, but they were either too complicated to perform such a minuscule task, or to complicated to figure out in the amount of time I had. JRedirect was so simple and I had it done in 2 minutes after installing the plugin. It is set within the plugin parameters (of course) like this oldurl|newurl (they are seprated by the pipe, the shifted character on the backslash key). That simple. No user groups to set, no piles of old URLs to search through to find the one I needed to redirect (sh404SEF!!!). Plain old simplicity at it’s finest. In my case, it looked like this:
students/the-forum.html|/forum.html
Please note the order here. You leave off the root of http://www.mysite.com/ and just take what is after it. Then, in the second URL you make relative to the site root as well, but with the / in place, otherwise it would redirect you to http://www.mysite.com/students/forum.html rather than http://www.mysite.com/forum.html.
JRedirect in Action
Enjoy!
