Question

I have written a CMS for a website. You can create pages and do all things you would expect but I am just wanting your opinions on what to do if a user changes the URL of a page. You would need to do a 301 for the previous stored URL but if the user changes the URL 10 times you have to account for all those changes.

Therefore do you not allow users to change the URL or are there other approaches?

Thanks

Answer 1

I’d imagine that a user renaming a page isn’t going to happen very often, so you might be able to afford to run a scan through all of the pages in your database looking for references to the previous URI. Present a warning page to the user, saying “All of these pages have links that will now go to 404 because of this change”, and give them options:

• Establish a 301 as you’re thinking
• Automagically update the identified links
• Don’t rename the page
• Don’t make any of the changes

Of course, you could always just perform the automatic update and let the user back that out too, but that necessitates a fairly complex WAL set up that I can tell you from experience is a huge pain.

Just my $0.02!