Re: Cost of redirect and site domain switch? Good Practice / Bad Practice / Terrible Practice

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Tristan <sunnrunner@gmail.com> wrote: > > My colleague is saying > > "but I still think we should change all the references to someolddomain.com > to some newdomain, especially in the code base, database etc..." > > I don't want to introduce more problems if a find/replace doesn't go right. > Is there any valid reason for doing the quoted above or any argument against > doing that. If you have the luxury of time and resources, your colleague is absolutely correct. In fact, now might be the ideal time to convert all hard-coded values to a variable or definition that need only be changed once should this recur. Either way, the find/replace should definitely be done. Should anything happen to the original domain - expiration, transfer, or even a temporary DNS routing issue - you're screwed. You can't 301 from something that isn't there in the first place (though, for good measure, you can 301 *to* anything you'd like). From Linux, it's simple to write a 'for' loop to find, cat, and sed everything in the *.php, *.inc, *.html, etc. files, and database options are even easier. That said, of course, make sure you've got everything backed up just before you change the stuff, should things go awry --- and without a current backup, you can bet your ass they will. Murphy's Law. -- </Daniel P. Brown> Network Infrastructure Manager http://www.php.net/