redirecting .html to .php after converting site to php

[happyme]

I know this has been here before, but I can't find it!

I've rewritten a website as php, using the same page names e.g. links.php used to be links.html

How can I make the server honour old links from search engines etc that still use the html suffix?

TIA

Julia

[Pig]

You can use .htaccess. I'm not sure what else would do it.

[stolzyboy]

keep all the .html pages and put meta refresh's in there to the .php pages

if you have a page called page.html, have this in it as well as your keywords, etc...

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=page.php">

[Pig]

or, even better...

create a custom 404 error page (using htaccess to force your custom page to be used for 404 errors).

On this page, you have a simple regex script to get the first part of the url they requested. eg: mypage.html becomes mypage.

Then, do a quick header() to redirect them, tacking .php onto the end of the new name.

It would happen very quickly and would be completely transparent to the user. Plus, it would be more reliable than a meta refresh.

[stolzyboy]

i wouldn't suggest using .htaccess, kinda slow, i would use Apache's ErrorDocument directive, which you could be talking about, but using the wrong lingo

ErrorDocument 404 http://localhost/catch404page.php

then use that page to grab the requested page, like Pig said, and you are on your way

just to clarify, the .htaccess does the same as ErrorDocument, but it is slower (in computer time) than .htaccess, and you need to understand that if you have a .htaccess file, the server looks thru that for every request to the directory with that file, and every directory beneath that tree as well, but the ErrorDocument will only run when an actual error occurs

[Pig]

.htaccess is ubiquetous for most hosting providers, but modifying apache settings is not as common (not to say that it is never done).

I don't think using .htaccess to forward to a custom error page takes an appreciable amount of time, but I am not an expert in this are.

If you have the option to change the apache settings, I would go with stolzboy. Otherwise, .htaccess can do it too.

Good luck with the project.

[happyme]

thanks for all your useful advice

My site is hosted by fasthosts and for some inexplicable reason they won't let their customers use custom 404 pages.

I'll try that on another site I have hosted by a different company, and use the redirect option on this one, as it's a fairly small site

I'll let you know how I get on

Julia