Migrating from custom ASP & ASP.NET applications to PHP (Typo3)

Question

So we've hired a company to migrate our three websites from custom built CMS solutions to Typo3. One of our sites is still in classic ASP while the other two are in ASP.net 1.1 & 2.0. Typo3 wasn't my choice, but the choice of those with the purse strings. Anyway, the migration of the sites is progressing but I have a problem that nobody seems to be able to answer. How do we handle page redirects?

For example, on our classic ASP site, we have a lot of tracking links from our newsletters (7 years worth) that have urls like: tracklink.asp?ID=23421 How can we handle these links on the new PHP setup that Typo3 is running on? I can build a PHP page to handle the classic tracking similar to the PHP page, but if you go to the .asp page in the example above, we get a 404 error, even if the page is there, since by default, the system doesn't handle ASP pages. Is there a way to do some sort of redirect that will still pass the querystring variable to the new PHP tracking page? Also, we'll need to do this with our .aspx pages on the .net sites as well.

Any ideas??

Answer 1

You should be able to configure your webserver to let PHP handle pages ending in .asp just as it handles .php. How these associations are configured depends on your web server.

Answer 2

You could simply use the power of mod_rewrite to do this. Take a look at the htaccess file in the TYPO3 root directory and change it to your needs. What you want to do is sending an 311 Location changed permanenlty status code to the clients and redirecting them to the new URL.

I think this is a cleaner solution...

Answer 3

Another idea would be to use something that Microsoft uses. If you notice when you see a link to a Microsoft site, the link is generally go.microsoft.com/fwlink/linkid=####. Well you could build something similar.

In your database you have a table with all of your currently existing pages links. Each link will have a linkID and a redirect link to your new PHP based content pages. You then have a page that will take the go link, query the database, find the new link and then redirect the users on to the new home of the page content that they're looking for. When the visitor lands on the new page, you can always present them with a new perm link for them to bookmark.

Hope this gives you an idea in getting around this huge issue. Good luck.

Answer 4

I think you'll feel fine about tackling this once you've seen the Typo3 extension Cool|URI. It adds a nice gui so you can enter any special redirects. Uses mod_rewrite and .htaccess of course. Most other Typo3 devs will recommend RealURL over CoolURI but for my money CoolURI's easier to configure. HTH

Answer 5

Unfortunately there are some developers out there that will promise you the world and never deliver anything close to what you want. This is the problem businesses/coding skills.. sometimes you run into "developers" that only know how to install typo3 on the hosting account. I would personally recommend typolight or silverlight as drupal is a mess. (just my opinion.