Suggestion: 301 redirects for old post links

This is along the lines of the feature discussed on the roadmap trello board, but with an added wrinkle: I’d like to be able to set a URL that Ghost will listen on to redirect traffic. This is important to me because my old posts (which have been linked elsewhere) have the URL structure /category/year/month/day/title/ and although I can get close with Ghost’s date-in-the-permalink setting I’d like to not break everyone’s links unnecessarily. So basically, the feature request is:

/development/2014/01/01/blah/ -> 301 /2014/01/01/blah/

It’d also be great if changed post titles/URLs would make redirection links, so as to never break a URL.

It might make sense for this to be an app, but it would certainly help ease the transition of popular blogs coming to ghost.

[GaryStanton]

Sure, everywhere a slug can be changed or created in the UI it needs to run through a bunch of functions to check for conflicts and such. I’ve rolled this solution on several applications myself… I’d contend that slug functionality simply shouldn’t exist in an application unless this side of it has been taken care of, otherwise you’re just creating endless 404s every time a user changes a slug. I don’t think you should expect the user to handle this server-side, it can become completely unmanageable very quickly.

My usual solution has a function to check for a slug conflict (presumably something like this exists already, lest two posts end up with the same slug) and deletes any records where the ‘Old’ slug matches our ‘New’ slug - otherwise you can end up in an infinite redirect.

I can’t think of a use case where these redirects should be anything other than 301. If a user renames a slug back, the redirect conflict function takes care of the historical slug, and the redirect from the once new, now old, becomes a 301. ‘Permanent’ in this context is more about intention than timespan.

I have no experience with NodeJS at all, otherwise I’d have a crack at this myself… I might give it a look anyway. 😉

[harsaharsa]

👍 for this!