Moved_XH

Moved_XH facilitates to cater to pages which have been renamed. Direkt links to those pages will normally result in a 404 Page Not Found error, but Moved_XH makes it possible to redirect incoming requests to another page or to flag them as gone. Appropriate information is returned that informs bots about the change, what is particularly important regarding search engines, which can change the URL of the page and remove it from the index respectively.

Requirements
Download
Installation
Settings
Usage
Limitations
Troubleshooting
License
Credits

Requirements

Moved_XH is a plugin for CMSimple_XH. It requires CMSimple_XH ≥ 1.7.0, and PHP ≥ 7.1.0.

Download

The lastest release is available for download on Github.

Installation

The installation is done as with many other CMSimple_XH plugins. See the CMSimple_XH Wiki for further details.

Backup the data on your server.
Unzip the distribution on your computer.
Upload the whole directory moved/ to your server into the plugins/ directory of CMSimple_XH.
Set write permissions to the subfolders css/ and languages/.
Navigate to Plugins → Moved to check if all requirements are fulfilled.

Settings

The configuration of the plugin is done as with many other CMSimple_XH plugins in the back-end of the Website. Select Plugins → Moved.

Localization is done under Language. You can translate the character strings to your own language if there is no appropriate language file available, or customize them according to your needs.

The look of Moved_XH can be customized under Stylesheet.

Usage

Moved_XH stores its data separately for each language of the CMSimple_XH installation in a file moved.txt in the respective content/ folder. Incoming requests to pages that do not exist and have no rule in moved.txt are logged in the log file of CMSimple_XH. The description of the log entry contains the requested page and the referrer, if known.

The rules can be edited in the plugin administration under Main Settings. Each line of the file constitutes a rule. Rules consist of one or two so called page URLs. Technically speaking, a page URL is the name of the first parameter of the query string, i.e. everything between the question mark (?) and the first ampersand (&) resp. the end of the URL, if there is no ampersand. It is recommended to copy the page URLs from the address bar of the browser instead of entering them manually, because there will be some surprises. For instance, the page URL of the fictious page Fahrvergnügen is Fahrvergn%C3%BCgen and not Fahrvergnügen as one might expect.

There are two different types of rules:

Redirects

Redirect rules will redirect incoming requests for an old page URL to a new page URL or an external URL (which has to be fully qualified, i.e. starting with the protocol, e.g. https://). Both URLs are seperated by an equal sign (=).

Some examples:

You are restructuring your site and want to move the toplevel page Oaks to the second level below Trees, so add the following rule:

Oaks=Trees/Oaks

You have moved the page Oaks to another CMSimple_XH installation, so add the following rule:

Oaks=https://www.example.com/trees/?Oaks

You have upgraded from an ISO-8859-1 encoded CMSimple version to a UTF-8 encoded CMSimple_XH installation, and you have a page Fahrvergnügen, so add the following rule:

Fahrverg%FCgen=Fahrvergn%C3%BCgen

Gone

Gone rules will inform visitors that a page does no longer exists. They consist of the page URL of the removed page.

For example, if you have removed the page Temporary Information because it is no longer needed, so add the following rule:

Temporary_Information

Placeholders

The old page URL of the rules may contain placeholders, where a * matches an arbitrary amount of characters and ? matches a single character. Only the first matching rule will ever be used; others will simply be ignored for the request. Placeholders do not offer any new features, but are rather meant to avoid repetitions of similar rules. For example:

You have removed the pages Temporary Information 1 and Temporary Information 2, because they are no longer needed, so you could add the following rules:

Temporary_Information_1
Temporary_Information_2

By using placeholders, you can simplify, though:

Temporary_Information_?

It is also possible to use whatever has been matched by a placeholder in the new Page URL of a redirect rule (i.e. on the right hand side of the equal sign). This is done with variables of the form $1, $2 … $9, where $1 matches the first placeholder, $2 the second, and so forth.

For example, you are restructuring your site and want to move the toplevel page Oaks to the second level below Trees, where Oaks already has three subpages. You could add the following rules:

Oaks:White_Oak=Trees:Oaks:White_Oak
Oaks:Blackjack_Oak=Trees:Oaks:Blackjack_Oak
Oaks:Blue_Oak=Trees:Oaks:Blue_Oak

By using a placeholder, you can simplify, though:

Oaks:*=Trees:Oaks:$1

Limitations

Moved_XH uses the custom_404() hook, so it does not work if the hook is already defined. The system check reports whether there is a problem, and in which file the custom_404() hook is defined. Either uninstall Moved_XH or remove the existing custom_404() hook.

Moved_XH's rules do not work when you are logged in to the CMSimple_XH installation, as the custom_404() hook funktion is not called by CMSimple_XH in this case. If you want to test the rules without logging out, you have to use a second browser.

Troubleshooting

Report bugs and ask for support either on Github or in the CMSimple_XH Forum.

License

Moved_XH is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Moved_XH is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Moved_XH. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Credits

The plugin logo is designed by World Media Group LLC. Many thanks for publishing this icon under a liberal license.

Many thanks to the community at the CMSimple_XH Forum for tips, suggestions and testing.

And last but not least many thanks to Peter Harteg, the “father” of CMSimple, and all developers of CMSimple_XH without whom this amazing CMS would not exist.