Group Page Redirect

Hi there

Here comes another surprise - which is according to support by design - in my eyes simply wrong and a bug.

Well it has been a long and outstanding request by many that if when you click on a page group and get redirected to a child page then the url should change as well. Hope this is going to happen sometime in the future.

But this is not the issue now.

As you know group pages redirect to the first child page.

I was stupid enough (well sometimes it happens that you have such a need on a site) that I have the following pages set up (tree.png will show it to you clearly)

- Products (Page Group)
- - -  Product Line A (Page Group)
- - - - - - Product Line A - Product A1 (Page)
- - - - - - Product Line A - Product A2 (Page)
- - - Product Line B (Page Group)
- - - - - - Product Line B - Product B1 (Page)
- - - Product Line C (Page Group)
- - - - -- Product Line C - Product C1 (Page)
- - - Prices (Page)

Now my expectation would be that if I click on Products the page Product Line A - Product A1 gets loaded

But this is not the case. SF seems to go at it the following. Products is a Page Group so it will load the first PAGE it finds in the Group - In above example - Prices.

I wonder if I am the only one running into such a problem or the only one complaining about it. How should we do it if we need this structure. I sure hope I dont get a link to KB or some custom code.

Markus

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Hello Markus Berchtold,

As I explained you in one other ticket this behaviour is by design. The Actual page is a first-level child of the top-most group page so normally you are redirected to it. Sitefinity does not travers all the page tree recursively - it simply looks for the first fitting page in the current level and redirects to it. As I mentioned - this is by design and probably won't change.

Dear Lubomir

Just because its by design does not mean it has to stay that way.

What would the solution be. Redirecting pages instead of group pages?

Markus

@Markus

Here's the PITS issue on that...I agree...I'd like more control on what happens too.  I certainly was expecting the group page to not be a link in the rendered RadMenu...

Did vote.

As soon as I get some air I test if it could be done with redirectin pages redirecting to subpages but thats hasslesome as well since when you create the first redirect page the second redirect page does not exist. So clients would have make a phone link first and go back and change this.

At the moment it seems its simply not dooable to have a page structure as described and to me - thats a bug or at least bad design.

Dont't get me wrong - I love SF anyhow. Nobody is perfect.

Markus

Sorry

I know this is by design but this is simply strange and I really want to know
a) am I the only one with this problem
b) is Terlerik even considering this to be somewhat cumbersumb to clients

This is what I got now from a client

About us (Page Group)
=> Locations (Page Group)
=> => Head Office (Page)
=> => Branch A (Page)
=> Opening Hours (Page)

Since SF does redirect to the first real page in a page group it measn that if you click on About us you end up with Opening Hours.

So if Telerik tells me this is by design - then please explain to me how a client is supposed to handle this common szenario without having to use a work around. Or try to explain to me how he should do it.

There is a saying design follows content. And it should not be that the client has to follow SF to get somthing done.

 SF is very intuative but this can't be really what you want.

Three possible solutions

a)  Have SF traverse down PageGroups =>PageGroups => PageGroups => Page
b) Have the possibility to tell SF where PageGroups where to redirect
c) accespt this is by design, we don't care. Listen client you need to work around this like that.


http://www.telerik.com/support/pits.aspx#/public/sitefinity/6349

For anyone out there haveing the same problem

a) how do you solve it
b) please vote on PITS hopeing someone will see the need to improve SF here.

Markus

Hi Markus Berchtold,

We will take this in consideration in all cases. I noticed some clients don't use Group pages, but internal redirection pages instead. With this you can specify to which page to redirect exactly.

Dear Lubomir

Using redirect pages is a workaround but a cumbersome.

Here is What a client would have to do.
1) create a redirect page and point it to anywere since the page under it does not yet exist
2) crate a page under the redirect page
3) go back to the redirect page and now point to the created page under the redirect page

a) this is realy not nice to tell the clients
b) if you change the order of some pages under the redirect page the page will redirect to a fixed page and not the first under the redirect page
c) clients would have to remember to change the page the redirect page redirects to when changing order.

Its a workaround but not really what you want.

I still think the right way and the expected way by any client would be that a group page looks traverses down on all grouppages till it is finished and THEN shows the first real page.

Hope you can see my point from a CMS user and usability point of view.

Markus

Sorry I did get an error message and tried it a couple of times.

Btw - I love the error message.

www.marktold.com/theend

Markus

Hi all,

I just ran into a situation which is almost equal to the situation as described in this post.
Almost, because in my situation there are two normal Pages (no grouppage, no redirectingpage). When I click the parent (grouppage) it shows/redirects to the last childpage, which is a normal page. The weird part is, it's the last of 4 normal pages. When I unpublish this particular page, it redirects to the first normal child page. I've included a screenshot of the situation. Hope this clarifies the description.
So, when clicking the parent it redirects to AKJ. When AKJ is unpublished it redirects to Toegang. Hope this helpes.

For now I fixed the redirect towards the first normal child page.

Thanks for reading. Hope someone has an idea on how to fix this.

Regards,
Menno

P.S. I've voted the PITS issue; it would be great if this is fixed to a more user-friendly 'workflow'.

Hi all,

I just ran into a situation which is almost equal to the situation as described in this post.
Almost, because in my situation there are two normal Pages (no grouppage, no redirectingpage). When I click the parent (grouppage) it shows/redirects to the last childpage, which is a normal page. The weird part is, it's the last of 4 normal pages. When I unpublish this particular page, it redirects to the first normal child page.

I've included a screenshot of the situation. Hope this clarifies the description. So, when clicking the parent it redirects to 'AKJ'. When 'AKJ' is unpublished it redirects to 'Toegang'. Hope this helps.

For now I fixed the redirect towards the first normal child page.

Thanks for reading. Hope someone has an idea on how to fix this.

Regards,
Menno

P.S. I've voted the PITS issue; it would be great if this is fixed to a more user-friendly 'workflow'.

Another problem with page redirect.

I also have a hard time accepting that this is a designed feature. It used to work correctly in Sitefinity 3.7, and we had many page groups redirecting to the first page in the first page group below it. We are completing an upgrade on a 1000 page site, and have run into this problem with 75% of our pages. 

I voted for the PITS, but it should have been better documented, and there should be a workaround.

I think in the backend advanced settings -> Pages there's a checkbox that will let you set what you want to happen...I always have it redirect.  Was added in a recent release, not sure exactly which one.

Dear Steve

That would be good news if these two cases were solved.

www.sitefinity.com/.../386958_sf-grouppages.png -> never showing a page
www.sitefinity.com/.../301417_tree.png -> first real page needed on top 

Will do some testing later in the week to see what is happening.

Markus

I'm having the issue but it's probably just a variation of it.

 Example,

Group page has a child page. When you navigate to the group page, the child page shows. Which is good, but the url in the browser does not reflect the child page, rather it shows the url to the group page. 

What I'd expect, atleast the url should change to the child page with a 'redirect http code' to the child page. Wouldn't this appear as duplicate content to a crawler?

Where is this setting SFSteve? I'm curious about checking out the advanced setting you mentioned. 

Hello Richard,

The setting Steve refers to is found in Administration->Settings->Advanced->Pages and its called

Redirect to the first accessible page inside a group page

When not enabled Sitefinity does a rewrite and when checked it does a redirect. In your case you need a redirect so please enable this property, then save the change and recycle the application in order for this to take effect.

Regards,
Pavel Benov
Telerik