Instructions for creating redirect links
Most of the pages on our new platform currently have Devanagari (unicode) letters in their URL.
For example, the URL
https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/2_-_धातुगण-परिचयः
gets converted internally by web browsers into something like
https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/2_-_%E0%A4%A7%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%A3-%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%83
as they may or may not be able to process unicode characters directly. So, we need to do something about this.
Hereafter in this article, the term "base URL" for the new miraheze site will refer to https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/ .
Creating redirect links with roman characters
For the page mentioned above, the equivalent page on the old platform had the URL
https://sites.google.com/site/samskritavyakaranam/01---dhAtugaNaparicayah/2---dhAtugaNa-paricayaH .
If we consider the "base URL" in this case to be https://sites.google.com/site/samskritavyakaranam/ , then the page-specific suffix is whatever comes after it, i.e. 01---dhAtugaNaparicayah/2---dhAtugaNa-paricayaH . On browsing through various pages on the old platform, we notice that every page with content has its own specific suffix which consists only of roman letters, numbers and symbols. Our goal is to replicate the entire page hierarchy on our new platform just like it exists on the old one.
Thus, the first step is to create new pages using the roman letter naming. The URL of these new pages would be the new base URL followed by the page-specific suffix that we get from the old platform.
So, in this case, our new page would have the URL
https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/01---dhAtugaNaparicayah/2---dhAtugaNa-paricayaH
Since this page does not exist yet, If we try pasting this new URL in our browser and going to it, we see something like this:
As you can see, on the new wiki platform, the page-specific suffix becomes the page's title. While the above page does not exist yet, we do have the option of creating it. So, we then click on 'Create' as seen in the above image. This gives us the following message:
To enable the 'Save page...' button on the right-hand side, click in the editing area and make a change - the easiest way to do this and make an invisible change is pressing the spacebar. Then, you will be able to save the page, and get the following message when you try to do so:
Click the 'Save page' button as seen above to create the new page. This will be confirmed by a notification.
The second step is to make this new page redirect to our actual page that has the content. To do this, click the 'Edit' button to get into edit mode, click the button with the three horizontal lines located towards the right hand side in the visual editor toolbar and then click on 'Page Settings'.
In the dialog box that shows up, check the checkbox for 'Redirect this page to', start typing out the page-specific suffix of our actual content page (in this case, 2 - धातुगण-परिचयः, and then select it when it shows up in the drop-down list under it.
Once you've selected the correct content page, click on 'Apply changes'. The page will now change to the following:
Save the page by clicking the 'Save changes...' button on the right-hand side and then clicking 'Save page' as described in the first step above.
Now, the URL https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/01---dhAtugaNaparicayah/2---dhAtugaNa-paricayaH will redirect a user to the actual content page with the URL https://samskritavyakaranam.miraheze.org/wiki/2_-_धातुगण-परिचयः and can be used instead of it.
The above needs to be done for all content pages on the website, and all internal links then have to be made to point to these new redirect URLs with roman letters in them.