Winding Down Legacy; A Change in Redirects

BY David McKelvey 

We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the new website launch, so it’s hardly new anymore and it’s time to remove the last vestiges of the legacy website for external visitors (for all but ~tilde accounts for individuals). So, we’ve just changed how legacy redirection works. Here is how it worked before:

1. A visitor asks for http://www.lclark.edu/dept/pubcom/something.html
2. The server has a redirect for /dept/pubcom/, but no redirect listed for /dept/pubcom/something.html
3. Since the path /dept/pubcom/ matches the legacy style, the visitor is sent tohttp://legacy.lclark.edu/dept/pubcom/something.html automatically.

This meant that if a bit of content hadn’t been migrated, or someone had bookmarked a url, or an external link had not yet been changed, they would still get to the original version on legacy — a helpful feature during this transition.

However, as of yesterday afternoon, for all /dept/ and /org/ old Trillium sites on legacy, if there is a site-level redirect available, the visitor will be now sent to the www site home page instead of the old legacy page. Using the same example as above:

1. A visitor asks for http://www.lclark.edu/dept/pubcom/something.html
2. The server has a redirect for /dept/pubcom/, but no redirect listed for /dept/pubcom/something.html
3. Since the path /dept/pubcom/ matches the legacy style, the visitor is sent to the new PubCom home page http://www.lclark.edu/offices/public_affairs_and_communications/automatically.

A big caveat here is that if you specifically ask for an address using the legacy.lclark.edu in the url, then you will still see the legacy content. (It’s rare that external websites should have stored the legacy address, but possible.) We will continue to keep legacy available in this fashion for the time being as several services are still being migrated.

I would advise against linking to any legacy address that is strictly an old Trillium page. We are planning to close out Trillium editing in the near future, after we’ve migrated the remaining Constant Contact users. (If you are still editing a site in Trillium, please contact us — you need to move and we’re more than willing to help you.)

We’ll be discussing more about the closing of Trillium in the next several months, subscribe to our feed to keep abreast of the changes. And as always, email us or use the feedback tab anywhere on http://www.lclark.edu to talk to us about this or anything else web.