Redirects 404

Introduction

Redirect 404 allows you to specify a number of servers that should be attempted to be redirected to if a 404 (Page not found) error is encountered. This module is useful when you are doing a gradual migration to Drupal from another system (Drupal-based or not).

Description

Let's say you have a legacy system which contains most of your web presence and decide to migrate to Drupal, starting with the home page, but didn't want to orphan the legacy site. So, URL such as http://www.example.com/department would stop working and would return 404 to users visiting the site.

With mod_rewrite in Apache, it is possible to redirect 404 to an external URL, but it does not preserve the full request path nor support multiple destination servers.

If you specify legacy1.example.com and legacy2.example.com as your possible destinations for your Drupal site on www.example.com and a user visited http://www.example.com/department, which hadn't existed, Redirect 404 would then try legacy1.example.com/department if found, the user would be redirected. If not found, legacy2.example.com/department would be tried, and if found, the user would be redirected to that URL instead. If still not found, a custom 404 error page may be specified or a user message defined. You could also specify a site search URL as an option, so if you try to go to www.example.com/department and no servers are found that know what to do with the request, the user is taken to the search results page for department (example: www.example.com/search/department)

Roadmap

- #2076963: Redirect module integration: As of version 7.x-1.1 there is an ability to store a confirmed redirect (if you have Redirect module enabled), so that the next time the same request is made, the user is redirected immediately and a 404 is not triggered.
- #2076955: cURL Support
- #2076957: Client-side Redirect mechanism

Incompatibilities

- Requests which are handled with the Fast 404 module are not be handled by Redirects 404. Fast 404 "runs first" and the handles the requests on its own.