How do you do a 301 redirect within a cms please?

Listen up guys, it’s all really easy to understand - it was the roll eyes above that did it!! If anyones trying to genuinely help without the patronising stuff, then that’s great :slight_smile:

Oh yeah, one other thing, if there’s no control panel visible, that can usually only mean one thing, there’s no control panel visible!!

OK, this is just getting into definitions now. We are trying to help, however it may appear. :slight_smile:

We are really trying to establish what avenues of access you have to the site. You’ve confirmed that you do have a username and password that you can use to log in. Once you’ve logged in, what you see can be called a control panel, but if you don’t call it that, then that’s fine. I would call it that, but it doesn’t matter. A control panel (such as CPanel) is usually just that—a list of files and folders.

I guess the main question now is what kind of access this gives you. I’m still not clear on what you are able to see by logging in like that. It almost sounds like you are looking at the raw files on the server, but it could be just a set of files that’s isolated to the CMS. I’m still wondering how the clients and/or you update content on the site. Is there a place to type in raw text, or do you open files (such as .html) and enter content with HTML tags etc (that is, a pretty much static page)? I’m still not entirely convinced this is a CMS at all.

Thanks and yep, definitions do differ, but Harry Potter and magic are never involved with it :slight_smile: Good to get back to sensible chat :slight_smile:

When I log in, all I see is the actual html files (where I can edit and save them, so that the amendments are then live) - nothing else.

OK, to be honest it doesn’t sound like a CMS at all to me, but a static website. And it sounds like you are thus logging in directly to the web server (or whatever it is to be called). It’s probably that you could use the username and password you have to connect with the hosting account via FTP, and thus do something like work on the site through a text editor like Dreamweaver and then upload to the web.

When you log in, do you see any option to ‘view hidden files’?

I’m wondering if you were to connect to the site via FTP that you could then download the site’s files and then see if there’s a .htaccess file already there. I’m starting to expect that there isn’t, so it might just be a case of creating one yourself.

Alternatively, when you are logged in online, is there any facility to create new files? Perhaps you could just create a .htaccess file there.

If the help provided here isn’t adequate for your needs then I suggest you look elsewhere. This is a great Q&A site for beginners and to save us all some time I highly recommend you ask there.

What ralph.m states is likely correct, and should you post on the Webmaster StackExchange site I recommend you include the relevant information from here.

Thanks - will bear that in mind :slight_smile:

Thanks - I did try FTP, but the un and pw I had didn’t work.

Nope

Hmm, it’s hard to know what else to suggest then, but I really think you need to go back to the clients and ask for more information. Perhaps ask for details of what was discussed when the site was first built. Presumably there would have been an email from the hosting company giving server log in details, for example. You really need that now. In my experience, clients can draw a blank on all this at first, but if you press the point, they start to discover old emails and other correspondence that brings things to light. There should also be web host contact details, in which case you can talk to the web hosts and re-establish the information that’s needed to manage the website properly.

Thanks Ralph - have tried to get this information via my client, but it’s not forthcoming. Anyways, it was a worth a try here :slight_smile:

It should at least be easy enough to get the name of the web hosting company. They will want to confirm with the site owner that info can be shared with you, but then you can get all the info you need from the host. Don’t give up: it will happen. :slight_smile:

When you log in, what is the formatting of the URL? Does it start with ftp:// vs http://? I believe you mentioned you can do edits, and upload/remove files, correct?

Yup, it can be hard to work when you only have half of the answers you need but if the client isn’t forthcoming I would do a whois search on the domain or netcraft to see if I could get more information about the server, hosting company, etc… Then you can look at their FAQ or knowledgebase to see if they have information about doing a 301 redirect.

Domain tool Whois lookup
Netcraft internet exploration (use the what’s that site running search box)
BuiltWith (sometimes provides info on backend)

Thanks all for the continued help. The format is http://www