If you run into a problem, have questions about how something works, or have questions about functionality that is not covered, email webservices@uoregon.edu to ask for assistance.
Our Drupal system will automatically create a URL for all of the content on your website based on the title of your page—for pages on communications.uoregon.edu they would be communications.uoregon.edu/page-title-here.
Occasionally you may find that a URL is too long or you need to change the URL to make it easier to remember. In cases like this you can change and customize the URL for your web page.
Create Custom URL Aliases
- Go to the edit screen on the page you want to change or customize the URL
- At the bottom of the edit screen, click on the URL path settings tab (URL ALIAS in Drupal 8/9+ versions).
- By default, the "Generate automatic URL alias" box is checked and the URL will be based on the title of the page.
- To make your own custom URL or change the default URL:
- Uncheck the "Generate automatic URL alias" box
- Type in the new URL in the URL alias box
- DO NOT add a slash (/) at the beginning or end
⇒ NOTE: Drupal 8/9+ versions DO need the slash at the beginning of the URL alias - DO NOT use special characters (&, @, !, %)—use only letters, numbers, and dashes
- DO NOT use acronyms—if you need a shorter URL, acronyms work better for redirects going to your page
- DO NOT put spaces between words—use one word (like: title) or dashes (your-page-title) instead of spaces (your page title)
- DO NOT add a slash (/) at the beginning or end
URL Redirects
Occasionally you may need to add a redirect to a page instead of changing the URL alias, such as when migrating content from one page to a new page, or when you have redesigned your site and you want to make sure that an old page on your original site will go to the correct page on your new site. You may also need to create a URL redirect so that the page URL is easier to remember for users or if you need a shorter URL for a printed flyer.
Note: When adding a URL redirect, please make sure that the URL you want to use is not already being used. This can be done by typing in the the desired URL into your browser address bar to make sure it takes you to a "page not found" and not to another page on the site.
Adding a redirect to a page can be done while you are editing that page. When editing your page, at the bottom is a "URL Redirects" tab:
Click the tab and then click on the "Add URL redirect to this node" link on the right:
On the next page you can then paste in the URL of the original page into the "From" field and click the "Save" button at the bottom to activate the URL redirect.
NOTE: Make sure you do not copy over a / to the beginning of the "From" field or it will break the URL redirect. The "From" field should be everything after the .edu/ from your old page's URL
See the example below which shows the original page URL "communications.uoregon.edu/Old-Page" that will create a redirect to the updated page which has the URL of "node/32":
Redirects can also be created from the Configuration admin page, located in the Drupal 8/9+ versions area of the "Manage" shortcuts:
From there, you can click on the URL Redirect link and fill out the from URL and the to URLs:
Batch Redirects
We can also create redirects as a batch process using Excel spreadsheets. If you create a spreadsheet that has the URL of the old page and the new "node" number of the page it should go to, you can send the file to us and we can run a batch import.
NOTE: The batch process should be used only for when you have lots of redirects to create. If you have less than 10 redirects, it is easier to do them one by one than as a batch.
An example URL redirect spreadsheet with the old site to the new node pages is shown below:
