Migrate an Existing Store to Use the New URI Management features

[laserdisc_king]

I recently upgraded my store from Miva v4 to Miva 10. I'm wondering if it is possible to redirect old product page URL's to new product page URL's. In other words, if say there is an old link to a product on Pinterest, can that be redirected to the same product on the new site?

For example, old URL structure was
https://www.domain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv ?page=storecode/PROD/category/productcode

New URL to this same product currently is https://www.domain.com/productname.html

Thoughts on how to do this?

[Brennan]

Normally you could do this type of 301 redirect in the .htaccess file as single global rule. However the problem is going to be that your new links use the product name which is not available in the .htacecss file so there is no way to do a direct mapping this way.


You could first redirect these pages to a temp url such as /productcode.html. Then you could use miva's URI management tools to import all those links and 301 redirect them to the real URL /product-name.hmtl

That does require two 301 redirects though which is not ideal

Another option would be to manually add 301 redirect statements for each old style link to each new URL for your top pages.

[laserdisc_king]

Thanks for your input, Brennan.

O.K. Manually adding 301 redirect statements for each old style link to each new URL for top pages is out. All of our products are "top pages", and there are too many (1286).

Why are two 301 redirects not ideal? What could happen?

I'm thinking I should make the new links use the product code in place of the product name and then use a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file as single global rule. Could you possibly tell me how to do that? How do I change it to product code in place of the product name? I'm guessing I need a Product URI Template. What exactly should I add to the .htaccess file?

Michael

[lesliekirk]

Normally you could do this type of 301 redirect in the .htaccess file as single global rule. However the problem is going to be that your new links use the product name which is not available in the .htacecss file so there is no way to do a direct mapping this way.


You could first redirect these pages to a temp url such as /productcode.html. Then you could use miva's URI management tools to import all those links and 301 redirect them to the real URL /product-name.hmtl

That does require two 301 redirects though which is not ideal

Another option would be to manually add 301 redirect statements for each old style link to each new URL for your top pages.

I think I understand what you are saying but then again I don’t. Can the URI Manangement be used to generate all these URI’s?

[laserdisc_king]

Let me throw this in...

From Joe Owens, Miva Support Engineer:
"With this, you should be able to make a somewhat "greedy" htaccess rewrite rule that looks for queries containing something like "page=storecode" then strips everything except the variable past the third / character in the query string, and redirect it do domain.com/remainingVariable

https://www.domain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv ?page=storecode/PROD/category/productcode to https://www.domain.com/productcode which URI management should 301 push to canonical at https://www.domain.com/productname.html

With the "greedy" htaccess rule ignoring the PROD page template and the category in the old URL structure, this should handle both CTGY and PROD pages."

[laserdisc_king]

I'm wondering what other people are doing or have done in this situation. This has got to be a common problem when upgrading from Miva Merchant v4 or 5 to Miva 10. It would be nice if there was an easy way to do this and not loose search engine rankings built up over the years. I think this should be built in to Miva. It should be a lot easier.

[Rick Wilson]

Considering Miva 4 has been End Of Lifed for 10 years and out of date for 16 years, it's certainly not anything we get requests to help with these days. Perhaps one of the old timers will have some thoughts, but this is definitely an edge case at this point.

[laserdisc_king]

I see quite a few sites still using Miva 5, which would be the same scenerio. They will run into the same issue if they upgrade to 10. Miva's URI Management does not support URIs that contain '?'. Miva 4 and 5 URIs contain '?'.

[Rick Wilson]

Almost no one uses Miva 5, don't let the url structure where is says mm5 fool you, they aren't correlated. Regardless this is literally the first time I've ever seen this request.

[lesliekirk]

Question - can this "format" (or any portion of it) of the link be entered into the URI Management as a 301 redirect to the Canonical?

https://www.domain.com/Merchant2/mer...ry/productcode

/Merchant2/merchant.mv?page=storecode/PROD/category/productcode

Sure it would all have to be built in a spreadsheet to import - if it works...

[ILoveHostasaurus]

This issue is specific to sites that had been running what I think was the old eMedia Search Friendly Links module? I can't remember which one did that /page/ctgy/prod style link in the query string but I think it was that one. The manner in which you're using it is actually one that was rarely used, as the primary purpose of that module was to convert from what was then Merchant 4-style "long" url's looking like /merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=abc to ones that look like static files, i.e. /prod/abc.html and in either of those scenarios, the transition to URI management would be easy.

So, this issue will not occur for a version 4 or 5 store using normal links, native short links (in 5), or even the preferred short link format of that module, it's just the very unique query string-based short format which was one of the proprietary options the module would permit. This is simply a bad luck situation, but given that module, its developer, that version of Merchant, etc. all went end of life in the prior decade, there was no development time put into such a rare scenario involving one third party module that was long abandoned.

I personally think Brennan's option is the ideal solution, even though it involves two redirects. The reason is because redirect one takes a proprietary piece of the query string out that the third party module would have needed, and sends it to a URL that URI management can handle; one small bit of code that auto handles every request since they all match a simple pattern. That allows the request to be handled by Merchant properly after those URI's have been added to URI Management. Then, redirect two occurs by the store itself to send what is now a product code-based request to your preferred product name-based URI so the end result is the page you wanted the shopper or bot to see.

[laserdisc_king]

Yes, we were running the Search Friendly Links module from Copernicus Business Systems.

What would redirect one look like? I assume it would be placed in the .htaccess file.

What would be an example of the URI's that need to be added to URI Management?

[laserdisc_king]

Question - can this "format" (or any portion of it) of the link be entered into the URI Management as a 301 redirect to the Canonical?

https://www.domain.com/Merchant2/mer...ry/productcode

/Merchant2/merchant.mv?page=storecode/PROD/category/productcode

Sure it would all have to be built in a spreadsheet to import - if it works...

These are two rules I see that would apply:

URIs must begin with a forward slash

URIs may not contain spaces or any of the following characters: ? #

I was able to enter /PROD/category/productcode into URI management. Strange thing occurred when I saved it. It added a forward slash and an M. It looked like this: /M/PROD/category/productcode

[lesliekirk]

These are two rules I see that would apply:

URIs must begin with a forward slash

URIs may not contain spaces or any of the following characters: ? #

I was able to enter /PROD/category/productcode into URI management. Strange thing occurred when I saved it. It added a forward slash and an M. It looked like this: /M/PROD/category/productcode

Yeah - I forgot about the character restrictions - well darn, so close but so far away.

What does your Product URI Template have in it?

[laserdisc_king]

Yeah - I forgot about the character restrictions - well darn, so close but so far away.

What does your Product URI Template have in it?

This is what is I have now for Product URI Template:

/<mvt:if expr="NOT ISNULL l.settings:product:slugified_page_title"><mvt:eval expr="tolower( l.settings:product:slugified_page_title )" /><mvt:else><mvt:eval expr="tolower( l.settings:product:slugified_name )" /></mvt:if>.html