Considerations for changing a page's URL in a CMS

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

If you are worried about the 10 sequential requests caused by the 301's, you could have a script periodically going through all "redirect pages", figure out the most recent URL they now point to, and point them straight there without intermediate redirects.

Alternatively, keep a list of the original URLs along with the lastest one, so you can update all of them when the URL changes again.

Answer 2

Quite a lot of CMS's simply just don't allow the permalinks to be changed so if your worried about not complying with some rule you wouldn't be the first to not allow it.

If you do however implement changing the permalinks (say by changing the title) you'll have to store N titles for each content item and just redirect to the title with the highest id.

ContentItemTitle
id - auto
increment text - unique constraint
contentId - reference

This is linked back to ContentItem as a 1 to 1 relationship.

Then when you recieve a HTTP request for <text> just lookup all the ContentItemTitle rows that share the same <contentId> as <text> and pick the one one with the highest <id> and redirect to that.

Answer 3

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!