A script to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess?

[bimmer540]

I was wondering if anyone could help provide some resources on how to automatically write 301 redirect rules to htaccess.  Allow me to explain...

I'm building a new website and the primary users are businesses.  They have their own profile pages on the site.

The URL is based off of their Company Name.

In the event that they decided to change their name... reasons being, perhaps they mispelled it the first time, or they're removing LLC or adding Inc, I want to also change the URL and redirect the old URL to the new URL.

Since the URL is based off of their Company Name, making a change to the company name would make a change to the URL.  I know it doesn't have to work this way, but for our purpose this works best.

In case the old URL had any links to it, I wanted to see if there was an way to automatically update an htaccess file with a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Could anyone point me in the right direction of how to do this?  Perhaps a sample script.  I've done a lot of searches on Google and can't seem to find anything.

e.g.

Original:
Name:  XYZ Widgets
URL:  website.com/xyz-widgets

New - business changes their company name in their profile:
Name:  XYZ Widgets, Inc.
URL:  website.com/xyz-widgets-inc

Upon the user saving the changes in their profile, I'd like to write a 301 redirect to an htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /xyz-widgets http://www.website.com/xyz-widgets-inc

I know how to manually write redirects and I've got a pretty smart web developer.  We've just never triggered a script to automatically write to an htaccess file before.

Is this possible?  Any resources are appreciated.  Any security risks?

Thanks!

[Klarke]

The rewrite done by WP is a 301.

[bimmer540]

Thanks for the reply. I've seen WordPress and Joomla do this before. But we don't use a CMS. It's a custom PHP framework. Although in my research I read that WP does a rewrite but not a 301 redirect. Not sure. WP has so many plugins so maybe there is one for redirecting changed file names. I'm sure between htaccess and a DB table we can do it. We'll definitely give it a try. I was just hoping to find an example of this online that I could view first.

[Klarke]

So, what CMS are you using ?

I was in the same situation with one site.  Luckily I was using Wordpress/Custom Posts. A change to a slug automatically creates a 301 redirect from the old url to the new url.  There's even plugins that extend to allow the creation of the redirect even when changing the title.  The 301 redirects don't actually go into htaccess, but they are handled by Wordpress and stored in the database.  Another reason why if wordpress were a woman, I'd want to have babies with her.

Do some searching and see if there's a similar extension/plugin or something you can do to have that functionality within your CMS.  If its custom, get your programmer to code it.