TYPO3 - Migration from RealURL to CoolURI

Question

I have a big TYPO3 instance that exists for ages. All the time the webpage used RealURL but now we want to migrate to CoolURI because we have better experience with this. Now the problem is that all old links shall be available even after switching the URL extension. The CoolURI documentation states

Migrating from RealURL
The field Speaking URL path segment (tx_realurl_pathsegment) is kept with its values, but make sure it's listed in the element.

I got the tables tx_realurl_pathcache and tx_realurl_uniqalias besides some other tables like redirects, etc. But I don't really understand the function and differences of these two tables and can't find any indepth documentation on this. So I'm a bit afraid right now that I have to reverse engineer the whole extensions and then write a script which exports all the old URLs and imports into the new CoolURI tables. Because we also use tt_news and these URLs have to work, too.

So does anyone have some experience with this? Does CoolURI automatically handle everything and the old links are still valid or if not maybe someone could give me a detailed explanation for all the RealURL tables in the database?

Answer 1

I wouldn't migrate if there is no really important reason (like ie. missing feature). To make sure that you'll be able to generate all links properly and then map them into CoolURI you'll need to learn RU logic anyway.

Reason: RU generates links on the fly - if it's required, and then caching it in the tables, other tables stores links to common pages and other for extensions. You would need to just write custom extension which will visit each page, to make sure that RU cached every possible link and then rewrite all results into for an example list of redirects. IMHO it's not worth of wasting time.

Note, I don't want to say that CU is bad :) actually I don't know it. I want to just remember Voltaire's most famous words: "the better is an enemy of the good"