Using PHP for 301 Redirects

This method is helpful if you need to redirect on a small scale and using .htaccess or mod_rewrite are not an option. My situation whe I needed to use this was when I was being hosted on an IIS server that did not allow URL rewriting. If anyone finds themselves in this position, hopefully this will be useful to you. It is really quite simple but would probably not be useful for larger sites.

Create a file in your root directory called redirect.php that looks like the code posted below.

<?php
$redirect = false;
$path = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if ($path == '/oldpath.php') {
	$path = '/newpath';
	$redirect = true;
}

$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if ($url != 'www.yoursite.com') {
	$redirect = true;
}

if ($redirect==true){
	header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); 
	header('Location: http://www.yoursite.com'	.$path);
}

?>

For each URL you need to redirect from simply add another:

if ($path == '/oldpath.php') {
	$path = '/newpath';
	$redirect = true;
}

You could alternatively also use this to redirect from a www url to a non www version of your site by replacing the last two blocks with:

$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if ($url != 'yoursite.com') {
	$redirect = true;
}

if ($redirect==true){
	header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); 
	header('Location: http://yoursite.com'	.$path);
}

And at the top of the page.tpl.php that you're using add the line:

<?php  require('redirect.php'); ?>

Again, the code posted "as is" is probably not the best solution if you are converting a large site as each url is listed individually, although if you are handy with regular expressions(which I am not), you might be able to tweak the code a bit to make it work for you.

Cheers -
David
http://www.flipoutdesign.com