Redirects are a great solution if you have information on an external site, or an internal page, that you want to reference and link to from your site. They link directly out to a different page, but still appear in navigation menus, as child links on landing pages and in search results, if enabled in site search settings.
For example, you may have an external careers platform, but still want to include a link to it in your navigation and search. In this case, you would create an OC Redirect Page to link to the external platform giving your community the option of finding it through your website.
How to create an OC Redirect page
- Right-click on a parent page in the site tree.
- Select Create Page.
- Choose OC Redirect Page as the content type.
- Fill in the necessary fields.
- Publish the page.
What to include on your OC Redirect page
Use the following information to fill out OC Redirect Page fields:
| Field | Function/Display |
| Page name | Completes the unique Page URL |
| Page title | The title displayed in menus, search results, and on landing pages. |
| What is the purpose of this content? This will be displayed in listings | A short description of the page content that appears on Landing pages, listings and search results |
| Redirect to |
Use the Insert links option to link to internal pages by selecting that page through the content selection menu. You can also insert external links by pasting the URL into the Link URL field |
| Add page image | Used as the main image displayed on the landing page or content lists |
| Supporting information | |
| Add common search terms people would use when looking for this content | Keywords or metadata to boost page in search results |
| Content labels | These labels organize your content internally (i.e. your site visitors won't see the labels). You can also make content lists out of these labels. |
What else can I do with redirects?
OC Redirects can be used for many purposes, but here's one more example of a redirect page in action. The City of Point Russell wanted to link from their 'Community' page to a list of events specifically for kids and families.
To achieve this, they filtered the full events listing page by the ‘Kids & Family’ category and created a page that redirects to the URL of the events listing with that filter in place. They also edited the date filter in the URL to show future events only:
If the original link has a specific date and shows:
https://pointrussell.opencities.com/Community/Event-Activities?dlv_OC CL Public Events Listing=(dd_OC Composite Date=10 May 2022)(dd_OC Event Categories=Kids %26 family)
They need to change the bold text above to read "0d", so it looks like:
https://pointrussell.opencities.com/Community/Event-Activities?dlv_OC CL Public Events Listing=(dd_OC Composite Date=0d)(dd_OC Event Categories=Kids %26 family)
This way they ensure that the page can be found in the menu, on the Community landing page, and in search. Selecting the redirect page in any of these locations will then take site visitors directly to the filtered events page.
