Forum Moderators: open
What's the best thing to do with URLs?
To me, there are two options:
1. To use the default Drupal URL format, and add re-directs/aliases to the system so when a user goes to the old URL it will take them to the right place. Is that likely to lose us SE rankings as they find the new URLs?
2. Migrate the existing content to Drupal, forcing it to use the existing URLs. That's fine, but then I'm concerned then when we start adding new pages, if we're not careful, we're going to start running two different formats of URL, which may get messy and look a bit ribbish.
Any preferences out there?
Drupal allows you to rewrite the URLs any way you want from within the system (check out URL aliases on the control panel - "path" module must be activated).
Using this system you shouldn't really have to do any mod_rewrite work except when you actually need to change a URL for some reason.
The one thing I don't like about it is that if you want to have URLs in the form
h**p://example.com/cat/subcat/page
you have to remember the names you're using for the cat and subcat parts and type them in. To solve that, I've written a simple module that grabs URL values for cat and subcat from the DB and prepends them automatically. It doesn't solve the problem of collisions, but the path module will handle that by appending a number if you try assign an existing URL to a new page.
So if you have a logical structure to your current URLs, there's no reason you can't replicate it on Drupal and not do any redirects or rearchitecting (is that a word?) at all.
