CMS resources
Technology insights
Back to Technology insights

Redirect Importer boosts data entry productivity for URL redirects

I enjoy working at Brightspot for many reasons, one of them being at the junction of cutting-edge software development with creative blogging and media design. Another reason is a combination of two different types of days:

  • Brain Days—Lots of thought and analysis to accomplish a single task, such as publishing recommendations for improving site performance.
  • Mindless Days—Zilcho thought to accomplish repetitive tasks, such as entering myriad URL redirects.

Brain-Days are the most satisfying, of course. Mindless Days, rare as they are, provide an effortless way of being productive. Regardless, Mindless Days lose their burnish rather quickly. After about 15 minutes, I start wondering, “What am I going to tell my children what I did at work today? That I replaced all instances of nine planets with eight planets in our 1,234 astronomy articles because Pluto was cruelly downgraded to being a rock?”

Similarly, entering redirects into Brightspot can quickly devolve into a very repetitive task. If you customized your path’s design, then a change from https://brightspot.com/sports to https://brightspot.com/athletics can potentially require redirecting every single asset under the old Sports section to the new Athletics section. In Brightspot’s standard edition, you can enter these redirects in the Vanity URL Redirect form. That’s a reasonable proposition for fifty or so assets, less reasonable for many more than that. Aside from being a time sink, perhaps the biggest risk of manually adding many redirects is replicating a mistake, requiring you spend additional time to correct them.

With Brightspot’s Redirect Importer extension, you prepare a Google Sheets with all the redirects. You can leverage Sheet’s features, such as find/replace and functions, to quickly design and populate the redirects. You then import the Sheets file into Brightspot and review the results.

Sample redirect import file
Sample redirect import file

Brightspot lists the imported redirects so you can review and adjust them as necessary.

The primary benefits of Redirect Imports is automating a possibly repetitive data entry task, and avoiding replication of mistakes.

Share
Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
About the Author
At Brightspot we believe technology should enable content-focused teams to work smarter, faster, and more seamlessly to move businesses forward. With decades of experience in publishing and media, we help companies transform their business content and digital experiences by creating enterprise applications at scale with astonishing speed.

Related resources

Brightspot's standard theme includes front-end templates for attractively rendering articles, videos, listicles, promos, and much more. Developers can build on those standard templates to deploy themes that range from simple to extravagant.
Customizing a theme is a big part of front-end development. To facilitate that development, Brightspot provides Styleguide, a webpack-based application that previews a theme with mock text and images. With Styleguide you can immediately evaluate any change by reloading the browser page.
A common task in web application development is deploying API endpoints that are managed by application admins—a situation that may introduce errors into a production environment. Brightspot’s native classes facilitate the deployment of robust and secure endpoints.
Streamlined processes for creating and managing API endpoints are essential, and the technical complexities associated with APIs can often pose challenges. Brightspot provides a proven, field-tested UI for intuitively designing API endpoints.
Brightspot gives editors even more flexibility than before by enabling them to create their own content types in just a few mouse clicks
JAMstack has emerged in recent years as a popular standard for web development. But what is JAMstack, and what's driving its adoption among web developers? We take a look at the pros and cons of JAMstack, and how Brightspot integrates with this approach.
Let us give you a demo
Hear how Brightspot can turn your digital strategy goals into a reality and see how the lives of your content creators and developers will be changed using our platform.


Request Demo