Today we had a mini site which the promotion had completed, but the site was to stay live with a few of the content pages staying live for people who come to view it.

Because the site was only a few pages there isn’t a CMS back-end, it’s just flat ASPX pages are stored in a single folder.
The problem is, that the pages which need to be available are also in the folder which the pages which are not longer accessible are.

There is a few ways in which I can take down the pages which people aren’t meant to access, firstly I could just delete them. That’d work, but that’d be a 404 error which isn’t really a good user experience (I could set the 404 redirect to be the home page, but the browser would still receive a 404 HTTP status).

So the next option is URL Redirection, lets crack out our UrlRewriting.config file and set up a rule. We’ll start with a rule like this:

<add name="RedirAllIndexedPagesToDefault" 
   virtualURL="^(.*)/pages/(.*)" 
   destinationUrl="$1/default.aspx" 
   redirectMode="Permanent" 
   redirect="Domain" 
   ignoreCase="true" />

There, that’ll handle everything in our pages folder, but it doesn’t help with the pages which I want accessible. Say the pages I want accessible are TermsAndConditions.aspx and PrivacyPolicy.aspx, but I don’t want Entry.aspx accessible.
It’s just a matter of modifying my virtualURL to be a bit stricter, so now it looks like this:

<add name="RedirAllIndexedPagesToDefault" 
   virtualURL="^(.*)/pages/(?![TP.*])(.*)" 
   destinationUrl="$1/default.aspx" 
   redirectMode="Permanent" 
   redirect="Domain" 
   ignoreCase="true" />

Now you’ll not be able to get to Entry.aspx, but the other two pages will still work just fine.

Sure it’s not great if you’ve got lots of pages (and if you did have lots of pages I’d hope there was a CMS to deal with it), but it’s good for mini sites which you want some pages but not others in a folder accessible.