htaccess alternative

Can anybody recommend method of creating global redirecting scripts other than htaccess?

We currently use htaccess to direct visitors who try and access pages which have been deleted or renamed to a page which gives them a list of alternatives. htaccess is also useful for globally directing visitors to a temporary page during development by typing one line of code we can avoid updating sitwide links to a single page.

We want to be able to run a similar script from a windows server because we need full support for asp too, and it is apparently impossible to run these htaccess redirecting scripts on a windows server. (a linux server won't support all of the asp functionality that we need).


Thank You.
Simon Neaves.

You can adjust/set what pages are served for 404 errors in the IIS properties. You can make it an ASP page, also, that'll be passed the page that was requested (somewhere in the headers or URL, but can't remember where exactly). You can dynamically display a message or redirect somewhere or whatever. Is that what you're after? If you want to handle more than 404, you'd have to set the same page or different pages for each response/error header.

---John Holmes...

hmm. This is good to know, although it's not just error messages that we want to redirect from. We have been using htaccess as a way of avoiding updating sitewide links when we change the name of a page.

I have taken on a site which has been through many redevelopments, and is not as organised as it should be. Up until we realised that we needed more asp functionality (hense the need to go with windows), we were using htaccess to tidy up all of the old links from so that pages like brief.php now go to brief.asp.

anyway, I am currently looking at http://www.isapirewrite.com/ as an alternative, but will look more closely at your suggestion when I get chance

Thanks for your help though. Much appreciated.

Offtopic, but I'd be interested in the functionality requirements that made you switch to ASP/IIS, if you can share. Just curious...

CDONTS for a start, but its more of a safety measure. The site still has a lot of developments to come, and I want to safeguard against having to move it again.

To be honest, I'm not massively experienced on the advanced ASP functionality, but I have been told quite a lot that chillisoft is not a comprehensive alternative to IIS. I'd prefer to have options for later on.

You'll probably tell me all of the linux workarounds for missing ASP components on chillisoft...