Erik Reagan

Redirecting can be a hairy thing if you don't know how to do it. Redirect Helper Lite is here to make that part of your life easier now. With a few clicks and strokes of the keyboard you can setup simple URL redirects for your ExpressionEngine site. You can also use Redirect Helper Lite to setup and track campaigns that utilize special URLs on your site.

Key Features

• Easily create redirects for internal URLs
• Choose between 2 commonly needed HTTP statuses for SEO purposes
• Automatically fill in your destination URL with the built-in generator (see docs)
• Setup redirects to external websites
• Disable a redirect by setting the status to Closed
• Built-in debugging tag to help track down any issues that may come from redirects

Example Usage

The most obvious and common usage of this module is to redirect an old link to an updated link. A perfect example is one of my old projects pages that I originally setup when my site was powered by WordPress. The URL at the time was http://erikreagan.com/projects/2008/05/catch-all-php-form-processor but after I migrated my site to ExpressionEngine the URL was http://erikreagan.com/projects/catch-all-php-form-processor/. I setup a simple redirect with this module to take care of the redirection. I use the HTTP Status “301 Moved Permanently” so bots would get the memo as well and indexes would be updated appropriately.

Another use for this module would be for campaigns where you want to track conversion. Every time a redirect is used a cookie is saved. This cookie can be retrieved for a number of purposes. A good example would be sending someone to your website to sign up to win free movie tickets. You may have a radio or tv ad that says (verbally), “visit our website at your tickets dot come slash free tickets to enter to win”. You could setup a different redirect for users who find the free ticket giveaway through the website directly. Another redirect from twitter, and another from Facebook, etc. Then in your form you could get the redirect cookie that is saved and track which campaign brought the most conversions.

Redirect Helper Pro

This module is the “lite” version of a commercial version that will be available in early 2010. The Pro version of Redirect Helper will have many more features aimed toward campaign tracking. It will also make it very easy for clients to add and track these redirects on their own. They won’t need any knowledge of how redirection works on a technical level and you, the developer, will be able to automate pieces and hide pieces from them to avoid confusion. Because of this module having both a free and commercial version the source code will not be available under my GitHub account.

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