The redirection plugin has been available on CMS for several years. It is widely used and offers an important piece of functionality for many sites.
Due to the scale of UBC CMS and the way in which the plugin is written, Redirection is no longer suitable or sustainable. As of this morning we have prevented any new sites from activating the Redirection plugin.
One of the key issues was that, by default, the plugin keeps a record every single time a user either hits a URL that you wish to redirect or they hit a URL that no longer exists (technically a 404 error). At the size of CMS, this adds up quickly. We have also disabled the 404 logging for all sites and will soon (within weeks) disable the ‘hit tracking’ stats for all sites. This data is obtainable from google analytics and the functionality causes a significant performance problem.
We are replacing Redirection with the Safe Redirect Manager plugin. It is designed specifically for large scale installations such as CMS, provides almost identical functionality in terms of the redirects you can make and has no unnecessary performance overhead. The Safe Redirect Manager plugin is now available to you to activate on your existing and new sites on CMS.
We strongly encourage you to migrate your redirects from the old Redirection plugin to the new Safe Redirect Manager plugin over the coming months. It is highly likely that we will remove the redirection plugin from CMS at some point in the future which means if you haven’t transitioned, you will lose your redirects.
Having a fast site is important – for you and your visitors. It’s also important to google. Improving the performance of CMS without severely impacting the functionality, as well as helping the team who maintains CMS in running the service is vital.
Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.
Edit: Jackelyn Thompson from the Faculty of Education has written a how-to guide on transitioning to the new plugin. Thanks Jackelyn!