We have pursued an incremental migration policy. So all the old content is still available but as we have new content we 301 it to the new location. The 301s can be done in .htaccess but if you have many of them it becomes a maintenance nightmare. So for instance we rename index.html as index1.html and create a new index.html thusly:
<?php 
// Permanent redirection 
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://www.nynjtc.org/"); 
exit(); 
?>
Of course php code in an html file is not interpreted unless you add one line to your .htaccess file right at the top:
# Run php inside html files
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
-------------
So anybody who tries to get to the old site instead winds up on the new site. And the new site has a link to index1.html so that it can get to the old site. 

To try this go to www.nynjtc.org and click on Home Old TC Site at the bottom of the left navigation menu. You will get to a highly modified old home page as most of the links there just take you to the right new place. It has taken us over a year to migrate useful stuff to the new site. Meanwhile Google still finds lots of the old stuff.


On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Greg Knaddison <Greg@growingventuresolutions.com> wrote:
Drupal's path alias system doesn't work with urls with ? in them.

I believe you can create redirects in your .htaccess file that can handle that.

Regards,
Greg

--
Greg Knaddison | 720-310-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com
Mastering Drupal | http://www.masteringdrupal.com




On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Mutuku Ndeti <jnmutuku@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Hope you are having fun/Had fun in your drupal 7 launch
>
> I tried adding an aliases(the content I am migration is not that much).  the
> non drupal site urls are in the form
> http://www.mydomain.com/item.php?artcat=Personal%20Finance&artid=71(same as
> external links from other sites)
>
> When I manually add an aliase (item.php?artcat=Personal Finance&artid=72).
> I get error "page not found"
>
> Will this work?
>
>
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
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