Custom 404

Background

When porting a static HTML site to a Drupal site, you often encounter this problem:

For the legacy site, it has a link: http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory/index.html and you do not want to change this link; and its Apache configure file declares that DirectoryIndex index.html, index.php.

On the new new Drupal site, you create a node with nid = 100 and duplicate the content of http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory/index.html. Thanks to Path module and Clean URL feature, you can set http://www.example-drupal.com/node/100's URL path as path/to/directory/index.html.

By doing this, you guarantee that a visit to http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory/index.html gets the same content as http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory/index.html.

So far, so good.

But what if your visitors go to http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory? Unfortunately, as they are visiting a path alias, not a physical path, they will not be able to get http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory/index.html automatically, even on the new Drupal site's Apache configure file, it also declares that DirectoryIndex index.html, index.php, as it only works for physical directory.

Worse more, in many cases, http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory instead of http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory/index.html is provided to visitors.

Therefore, after porting the site, we must make sure that a visit to http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory must be able to locate DirectoryIndex files declared by the legacy site.

For example, if a legacy site declares that DirectoryIndex index.html, index.php, then for visits to http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory, Drupal must first look for http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory/index.html, and if not found, try http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory/index.php again. If still not found, gives 404 Page Not Found error.

Sometimes, for somehow, we want to redirect all 404 visits to another website. For example, if http://www.example-drupal.com/path/to/directory/index.php is not found, we want to redirect visits to http://www.example-legacy.com/path/to/directory/index.php to see if this URL exists.

About this module

This module is developed to fix aforementioned problem. You can tell the module what string (file name) is to be appended to the end of a path if given path is not found.

For example, given path is http://www.example-drupal.com/some/directory and legacy site declares that DirectoryIndex welcome.htm, index.html. If http://www.example-drupal.com/some/directory does not exist, the module will try to find URL path www.example-drupal.com/some/directory/welcome.htm and www.example-drupal.com/some/directory/index.html respectively. If both fails, and if an external site www.example-legacy.com/archive is specified, this module will redirect visits to www.example-legacy.com/archive/some/directory to see if it exists.

See also

• Path Copier
• Claim Node Ownership