Page redirect within the same domain

Question

I have moved my old website from static html pages to drupal. Now I want to redirect old pages that I now get 404 errors upon request, to new drupal nodes.

What is the best approach to do this and how? Can it be done using .htaccess directives?

Answer 1

If you don't know what the address was, making a catch-all url would be a good way but that may cause some problems to drupal's working parts.

If you know the url of the old pages you can create a simple map or just simple rules with the .htaccess would be the safer route.

An example of catch-all would be:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php$
RewriteRule . index.php

The above rules would redirect anything that is not a existent file or folder within your domain and not index.php and redirect it do index.php.

The other way would be knowing the urls and doing something like this:

RewriteEngine on
# screenshot's page
RewriteRule ^(screenshot.html)$ index.php?section=screenshot [R=301,L]

There might be other ways too but these 2 were what i could thing right away.