Redmine Project Alias

Many of my Redmine and ChiliProject plugins changed their original ideas. Among them are - SVN Creator which now supports Git and Mercurial and therefore has been renamed into the SCM Creator, Google Ads which allows defining custom content for Redmine hooks and is to be renamed into Hooks manager etc. For all of them, as it appeared later, I chose the wrong project identifiers. And most Redmine users know that it can’t be changed...

So what’s next? Use that insufficient identifiers for historical reasons? Copy/move projects? Change the identifiers directly in the database?.. I would do the last if it did not make external links dead! That are the issues faced by many other Redmine users, as it appeared.

Well... You would not loose external links if there was a possibility to have the previous identifier as an alias so both identifiers worked at the same time. Having project identifier aliases seemed to be a good idea anyway (not sure what for else it would be useful however)... So the idea transformed into project identifier aliases with the possibility to choose the main identifier. All links with old and new identifiers work fine! But project links are generated using only the primary project identifier. For SEO the pages accessed using aliases contain <link rel="canonical" ... /> (this is what was not tested well!).

I can’t be sure it works without issues however! It does on my test Redmine! But I have not installed it on the production yet... That’s because with changed identifiers I won’t be able to access SVN repositories. At least. As a workaround I added a hook which can be used to change/fix things dependent on identifiers but I have not added support for it in the SCM creator yet... I also plan to patch Redmine.pm to add support for aliases...

So meanwhile you can help me testing it. I believe repository names is the only issue! But... You have been warned!..