Redirect to a new page from within a Drupal site

Question

I'm working with a Drupal site, and we want to set up a special URL that redirects to an external site. In other words, if http://www.mysite.com is our Drupal site, we want to have http://www.mysite.com/external redirect to the external site.

I have very little experience with Drupal and have no idea how to set this up. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

If all you want is to redirect the users to the same site, when they follow a link that takes them to http://www.example.com/external, then you can implement hook_menu() using code similar to the following one:

function mymodule_menu() {
  $items = array();

  $items['external'] = array(
    'title' => 'Redirect', 
    'page callback' => 'mymodule_redirect', 
    'access callback' => TRUE, 
    'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
  );

  return $items;
}

function mymodule_redirect() {
  drupal_goto($url, array('external' => TRUE));
}

If the URL to which the users are redirected depends from a value passed in the URL, then you can use code similar to the following one:

function mymodule_menu() {
  $items = array();

  $items['external/%'] = array(
    'title' => 'Redirect', 
    'page callback' => 'mymodule_redirect',
    'page arguments' => array(1), 
    'access callback' => TRUE, 
    'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
  );

  return $items;
}

function mymodule_redirect($id) {
  // Calculate $url basing on the value of $id.
  drupal_goto($url, array('external' => TRUE));
}

Answer 2

You could install the Path Redirect module which will let you do exactly that, no coding required.

If you're using Drupal 7, you want the Redirect module.