Hi,
I would like to know if there are any plans to change how URLs are handled in Dynamicweb 10 at some point?
The question comes from having to deal with some customers which wanting/needing to make changes to their URLs, becomes a challenge to set 301's and/or foresee the impact.
For example, Winnebago launched before there was even the URL Provider, so still using Customized URLs. Now planning to clean up the URL settings (moving to the URL Provider), we need to get a list of all URLs and set up 301 redirects because of marketing campaigns and bookmarked URLs over the years.
When it's a brand new project, that becomes a simple decision, but when supporting a customer that's going on for years and has multiple sites, a simple change like that has a big impact, because it's all generated on application start and stored in memory.
I am wondering if in the future there would be a better way to handle this? In my mind I envision that a simple change of a product name or ecom group (both of which could/can impact URLs), based on some setting of sort, any "old" URLs could be auto-saved and 301 redirects created.
I can see how this is complicated for DW currently, since the URLs are managed in memory, instead of being stored in a table in the database, where some backups and/or SQL manipulation could more easily handle the 301s.
For now we need to use something like Google Analytics to get a sense of URLs that could be impacted, before updating group/product names. It can be done, but can be a bit intensive depending on the volume of changes we need to do.
Best Regards,
Nuno Aguiar
