Hi all,
Was thinking of adding a feature request to the bugs database and wanted to put it past people on the forum first to see if they agreed or whether there were issues that I hadnt considered.
Its to do with redirect assets.
We use them a bit on our site but think its weird that when you list redirects in an asset listing and you put %asset_href% or %asset_url% keywords in the default format for each row it replaces those keywords with the web address of the redirect rather than using the address of the item that the redirect is pointing to. I reckon it would be better for %asset_href% and %asset_url% to be replaced by the destination URL.
Now, I know you can add a new type format for redirect assets in the asset listing and use a special keyword (%redirect_url% or something) to get that URL anyway, but it seems a little clumsy and a little too much work (especially to retrofit all the asset listings we made before that keyword was available).
Is there a reason why we would want to go to the destination URL via the redirects own URL? Is there a benefit to that?
Does anyone have any idea on whether this redirection affects our "link-love" from google and co?
Thanks for any input,
Steve.
Redirect pages can never have the redirect URL printed when you use the asset_url or asset_href keywords. Those are replaced by DB entries that store internal URLs only, so there is actually no way to do what you are after. It's not that it is a bad idea, it's just that it is not technically possible.
If the DB was to store the external URL in the lookup system for the redirect page, when you went to the redirect page's Matrix URL, Matrix would not be able to determine the asset you are requesting because it cannot find the current URL in the DB. You'd get a 404.
The use of the type format is currently the only way to do this.