By shanytopper on

Hello everybody

I'm helping my mother with her website, and just a few days ago we decided we want to convert her website into a Drupal based site.

Problem is, that becouse Google have already rated her pages, we want the google links to still work (and not by forwarding)

The sites URLs are currently like this: "www.thesite.com/catagory1/catagory2/..../catagoryX/filename.html"

Where: Catagory(1,2, and so on up to x) is the name of the catagory.
X can be up to 5 or 6 currently, though might get larger later.
Filename.html is diffrent with each page (though repetition of the same name in diffrent catagories is possible)

Now my question is this....How do I convert Drupal's URLs (/node/XXX) into those URLs?

I am sure It's a question that has been asked before, but I juest couldn't find an answer for that.

Thanks in advance.
Shany Topper

Comments

sym’s picture

sym commented

Try pathauto, or path - it should do what you want, but you will need mod_rewrite for it.

shanytopper’s picture

shanytopper commented

But the way I understood it, Path, and Pathauto, only allow me to change the path, not to create the filename itself, am I wrong?

also, what is this "mod_rewrite" you talk about?

Shai’s picture

Shai commented

I'm also a newbie, but I don't think this is possible within Drupal. And even if it were, it certainly isn't a newbie activity.

However, if you can keep her former site up, you can simply set up referral pages for each page you want to keep active to point to the equivalent place on the new site.

Good luck,

Kelev

content2zero.com

Dorine’s picture

Dorine commented

Hi Shany,

Here another newbie's note.

Our website www.ruaf.org was also very well visited and linked to. When we launched the new site and removed the old one we got thousands of false hits a day since Google didn't change its indexes so fast of course. Also a lot of people had bookmarked specific pages and used those links. All these visitors were automatically redirected to the 'page not found' node.

We didn't want to do any programming to change every link on our site so we just made use of this 'page not found' node. We modified this node to show hyperlinks to some of the main pages we had on the old website, so that visitors would find their way around quicly on the new site.

This doesn't solve your Google rate problem at all. But it might help you in regaining high search engine results quickly, without going through a lot of programming. But maybe you're just one of those Drupal newbies that's very talented at programming! Good luck with your site!

Regards,

Dorine Ruter
http://www.ruter.nl/blog

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Go read about path module. You can alias the imported content with the provious url's where:
www.thesite.com/taxomy/1 = www.thesite.com//catagoryX/filename.html
Here's the link to path docs, http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/path

There's other tricks and techniques using htaccess and redirects (403? The one that informs search engines and browsers that the contnet has been permanently moved) that might be better long term for you. I haven't had a need to use them so hopefully someone else will expand on them or it's enough of a lead for you to look up.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

robertDouglass’s picture

robertDouglass commented

... using the path module is what you'll want to do. Now, depending on how big the current site is, this could be a big job. How many URLs are we talking about here?

- Robert Douglass

-----
My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress

shanytopper’s picture

shanytopper commented

Although now I got this annoying bug that unless I'm logged on to the administrator account I cant see the pages themselves (yes, anonymous user are set that they do have permission to access nodes)

Anyone got an idea why has that happend?

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

what 3rd party modules do you have installed? maybe something to do with node access/security?

--
More Drupal modules

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Empty the cache table of your Drupal database as a first effort. It may be that something weird is cached there. If that sentence is not clear, reply back and we'll see about walking you through it.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

shanytopper’s picture

shanytopper commented

For me, anyway...

Sorry that I'm such a noob

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

You only learn from experiance.

The easiest way is to download and install the Database administration module and enable it.

Then go to Administer >> database
In the center area you will see View database 'your db name'
In that list is a table called 'cache'.
Check the box next to 'cache', look to the right and find the link to [empty]

You will go to a window that says

Are you sure you want to delete all rows from the "cache" table?

Click the empty table button and you will be returned to the main screen.

(In order to write these steps, I just did them all). You may want to click the 'check' button on the bottom as well and even pull a backup of your site if you don't already have a way to back up your site.

Now, this may not be it, but it is one thing I have seen reported as fixing this issue. If not, we'll have to look harder.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

shanytopper’s picture

shanytopper commented

I did what you told me, but the problam stayed.

It would seem that the root page of my site looks just like when I first installed Drupal (Welcome to your new Drupal-powered website....bla bla bla....)

Just as if I didn't put a single content page.

Any Ideas?

with many thanks
shany topper

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Then you have the more complicated issue. I've seen a solution posted twice. I'm trying to figure out what search words to use to find it. At least on other person is have a similier issue as well.
http://drupal.org/node/52429

Do you have any of the node privacy modules on your site?

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Let's have you take a look at this thread:
http://drupal.org/node/44906#comment-83927

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

shanytopper’s picture

shanytopper commented

Can you please explain it?

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

The problem that one of them encountered was that somehow they were missing UID0. UID0 is the 'anonymous' user access.

So, go to Admin >> database
Scroll down to the 'users' table and click 'view'
See if you have a UID0 in there
Here's mine. http://www.blkmtn.org/node/303

Found another related thread as well here which leads me to believe were on the right track.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide