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Admin Tools

#11010 Redirect URL

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by nicholas on Friday, 10 February 2012 09:45 CST

Wednesday, 08 February 2012 14:48 CST

user41218
Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: 1.5.25
PHP version: (unknown)
MySQL version: (unknown)
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you) Jumplin
Admin Tools version: 2.1.14

Description of my issue:

Hi, I'm trying to use the redirect feature and it seems to be being caught by my 404 page before it redirects to the page I have asked it to (can't remember how I did this as the site is a Joomlajunkie morph template and they've dissappeared!).

Are you able to help please?

Kind regards

Mark

Thursday, 09 February 2012 02:31 CST

nicholas
The "System - Akeeba Subscriptions" plugin must be published first (its ordering value must be the lowest number among all system plugins). Moreover, you have to enable the redirection feature in the URL Redirection page of Admin Tools. There is a toggle switch at the top of the page, right above the list of redirections.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:06 CST

user41218
Hi, the only plugin I have that has 'Akeeba' in it is the lazy scheduling one. The System - Admintools is set to -3000 for order and states in the plugin that this cannot be changed if this is the one you mean?

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:12 CST

nicholas
OK, the plugin order is correct.

Please go to your site's backend, Components, Admin Tools, URL Redirection. Right below the title, there is a field called "Enable the URL Redirection feature?". Is it set to Yes? If not, please set it to Yes and click the "Save preferences" button.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:18 CST

user41218
It's definately saved 'Yes', resaved it as 'no' emptied cache and resaved as 'Yes' and made no defference if it even would have?

Thanks for your speedy response by they way!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:24 CST

nicholas
That recycling of the option should have no effect. I start thinking that you probably got confused with the old/new URLs. Can you please paste me here the exact contents of a redirection, i.e. tell me what the Old URL and the New URL is?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:40 CST

user41218
So i've enter 'mortgage-broker-bristol' redirecting to 'about-us' and the website is (redacted)
Edited by nicholas on 2012-02-10 09:41 CST

Thursday, 09 February 2012 03:47 CST

user41218
(I'm having to go out and will be back in an hour)

Thursday, 09 February 2012 04:46 CST

nicholas
After looking at your site, I can see a redirection happening FROM about-us TO mortgage-broker-bristol. However, it also seems that your menu items define the "about-us" alias, not the "mortgage-broker-bristol" alias. So, can you try swapping the old and new URLs in the redirection and tell me if that works?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 05:35 CST

user41218
Ok, thanks for your help here. I think i'm responsible for the problem (i'm sure you already know that ;-) ), sorry. So it's down to how i've interpreted the proceedure for redirecting. I assumed the the existing url was the url that was being redirect from, not too. So I actually changed the link name altogether and swapped the about-us and mortgage-brokers-bristol (note brokers), and it worked. So I setup the redirect for mortgage-broker-bristol to mortgage-brokers-bristol the way I thought was correct and it 404'd. Swapped them around and voila! I have changed the links around on the website so that the top and middle 'About Us' links go direct to mortgage-brokers-bristol and have left the very bottom 'About Us' redirecting to mortgage-brokers-bristol.

In my mind, be it right or wrong, the existing url would say to me the one that google has indexed and can't find, and the new url is where you want google to find it's replacement. Or do I just literally have the wrong end of the stick? If I have, I do apologise sincerly for wasting your time and would like to thank you for your help today.

Thursday, 09 February 2012 05:47 CST

nicholas
I'm glad you figured it out!

The thing is, no matter how you name them, the two URLs can be confusing. You redirect FROM a URL TO another one. Which is the "from"? The one which already exists or the new one you want to create? Likewise, how do you interpret old and new in this context? Perhaps "old" is the one in your old site which no longer exists. Or is it something else? Anyway, I ended up with the following convention (which is thoroughly documented):

Old URL = The URL which would exist anyway, even without the redirection. This is the target of the redirection, where the 302 will point to.

New URL = The URL which only exists because of the redirection. If you try visiting it, a redirection will be issued.

Authors of SEF components have it better as they end up with SEF and non-SEF URL labels. When writing a redirection component, the labelling of the two URLs is very open to interpretation :p

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 05:56 CST

user41218
I'm starting to question my logic as a male. In retrospect I should have tested this out properly and switched the urls round to check as that isn't outside of my capacity.

Once again sorry for the trouble and thank you very much for all your help.

Thursday, 09 February 2012 05:57 CST

nicholas
No problem, really! The naming of the fields is confusing, I am aware of that. I did an unscientific poll once about the naming of the fields. The votes were equally spread out. What works for one will not work for the other :D

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 06:06 CST

user41218
I've just gone back into adding a new redirect as now I know how to do it theres a few more to do and i'm still fighting with my girl logic. In the old days, prior to Admin Tools Pro, I used the redirects in the htaccess and I think thats why i'm so stuck with a 'from' and 'to' convention from left to right. Oh well at least anyone else who comes up against this and is daft enough to not figure it out for themselves has a point of reference, although from what I can tell i'm the only one who needed to ask!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 06:15 CST

user41218
Is there a way of redirecting a link from "/buy-to-.."?

Thursday, 09 February 2012 06:25 CST

nicholas
I'd assume it's the same as any other redirection, no?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 06:43 CST

user41218
Lol, bear with me!

I have a number of sites linking to mine and the only reason I know is that GoogleWebmaster says so, but they are flagged as broken and the actual syntax is broken ie /buy-.. in the link line.

I mean thats the syntax /buy hyphen period period

Is there anyway of handling the punctuation, there's another link that ends with an "
I have added the "buy-.." to the new url and buy-to-mortgages to the existing url and the 404 page can't even handle it but I assume thats down to how Joomlajunkies error function?

Thursday, 09 February 2012 07:12 CST

nicholas
Ugh, I am not sure if such a redirection would work. In fact, I am not even sure Apache would hand over that URL to Joomla! or if it should throw a 404 error instead.

BTW, Google Webmaster Tools report a lot of URLs, even those you never had on your site. They could be the result of someone linking back to your site. Some Twitter clients snip the URLs using ellipses (three dots) or two dots which could explain the odd URL you've got there. IMHO, ignore it unless you see thousands of users coming to that URL in your server's log file.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 07:16 CST

user41218
Thats what I thought, but as I had your attention I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask the question.

Thanks again!

Thursday, 09 February 2012 07:20 CST

nicholas
You're welcome!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 10 February 2012 08:56 CST

user41218
Hi Nicholas

Sorry to add this here but I can't seem to tag on the end of the post where the other guy who can't log in to his backend, but I couldn;t either with my pw. Got round it by editing pw in user table, md5 save, which worked. Tried to the reset SA pw in user control and it keeps 403ing. Went into WAF config and changed the 'Disable editing backend users' properties to 'NO' it was yes. Voila, after I then blocked my IP and had to go in on my phone but have successfully changed previous SA username and pw. Is there any chance this is coincidence?

Friday, 10 February 2012 09:27 CST

nicholas
Yes, it's a coincidence. Guys, I am using the same software as you do, before you even have the chance to use it, on this site and all of my live and testing sites. If using Admin Tools resulted in not being able to log in to the back-end of your sites, I'd have noticed much longer before you did. What most likely happened is that you changed the Super Administrator ID and then disabled the wrong user. That's why there's a clear warning that you have to read the documentation before proceeding with that feature.

Regarding tagging along to someone else's post, it's no longer possible. I have gotten rid of the forum and I'm now using a ticket system. The ticket system only allows the owner of the ticket and support staff to post to it. I did that because User A had Issue X, User B had Issue Y and they both posted on the same thread because something random looked similar (e.g. they both use the same hosting company). I can't provide support if there are multiple people with different problems posting at the same time. It defeated the purpose of having a forum, i.e. having a linear tracking of the troubleshooting progress. Mixing in multiple issues resulted in me giving way off replies to all parties.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 10 February 2012 09:39 CST

user41218
In regards to sacking the forum, i'm totally on board with that.

I'm sure it is coincidence, but as I had the same issue and upgraded from 2.1.3 to 2.1.14 yesterday and it was the only install I did yesterday, and the only changes I made were to block certain country IP's and redirect urls, I came looking here after I'd sorted it, thought I'd mention- although I'm sure I made the wrong choice I do apologise. The only thing is that I didn't make any changes to the SA pw. Don't know, but I sorted it, so we'll assume it's just me again!

As always, thanks for your help ;-)

PS any chance of taking down my website url from this post please Nicholas?

Friday, 10 February 2012 09:45 CST

nicholas
This is a coincidence. Upgrading Admin Tools doesn't modify your login information. The only time we touch your login info is when you use the administrator ID change feature.

PS: I removed your site's URL from your post as requested.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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