I wonder if anyone can help. We have a site in joomla which is now moving to silverstripe.

The issue is that we seem unable to replicate the urls in the new silverstripe site as nesting and flat urls don't achieve the goal.

The tricky part is that we want to replicate the current urls as they get very good seo status - whilst i know that 301s can be used the consensus seems to be that they have some affect on seo and we just cant risk that.

An example would be this page on current site - http://www.flyingkiwi.com/new-zealand-south-island-tour/. On new site it will still have 1 "parent" navigation items and if we use nested urls or flat urls it still inherists the parent item. Also on some pages on the current site we have 2 parent items but the url doesnt inherit either of these - again this doesnt seem possible in silverstripe.

also the current site uses a mixture of .html and / at the end of urls - can silverstripe replicate this as at present we only have / at the end?

if someone can help would be highly appreciated? Is there no kind of url override plug in as you get in joomla or wordpress?
thanks
neil

By the sounds of it your existing urls are a little over the place (.html some nested). I would recommend for your new site setup the structure as you want from scratch then add 301 redirects to your .htaccess file to redirect old urls to the new ones. No idea what size site you have but 30-40 pages shouldn't take that long by hand, if you're scripting the process of importing pages (via an api) then you could also script the generation of the redirects.

Make sure you include the google sitemap module and submit the new sitemap.xml to Google once your new site has gone live and you won't see too much of a drop.

thanks for this and makes sense. is there any clever way of having a page which is nested 2 others (for example page tourx sites /under big tours and nice tours) but rather than the url being xxx.com/bigtours/nicetours/tourx it displays as xxx.com/bigtours/tourx?

thanks
neil