External URL Redirects Are Broken

On 14th February 2010, Business Catalyst announced the following change to the url redirection facility:

“One wish-list item that’s been asked for is to be able to view all URL redirects in one central location. Previously URL redirects were stored inside the webpage detailed view so it was difficult to find them. This functionality has been removed from webpages and is now been replaced by a URL redirect manager which you can access by going to Website > Web Pages > Manage URL Redirects. They now have their own interface where you can see the list of redirects on your site and easily create, edit and delete them.”

Unbelievably BC have broken the redirect functionality with this recent “improvement”. It is no longer possible to create redirects to external sites (i.e. to arbitrary urls).

This is an essential function when some elements of a website are not hosted at BC but you still want to provide a url within the normal site domain.

I have used this to set up exactly this kind of redirect. Now we have lost the old interface (which did allow external redirects) and gained a new “aggregated” interface which does NOT allow external redirects. Instead we get one of those infuriating popup-style text fields (like BC uses for dates) which does not allow direct typing.

Is this a deliberate design decision (certainly not mentioned in the feature announcement), or is it the case that nobody at BC bothered to test properly this new “feature”?