Setting up redirects via Craft routes?

Question

I'm trying to set up redirects for some pages (specifically pages in structure sections that are there purely for structure, which I want to redirect to their first child). Craft's "routes" seem to be geared towards routing a request to a template. But how can I simply route a request to a different URL?

I know I can use Twig's {% redirect %} function, but to be honest I'd much rather just set up all the routes I want redirected outside my template (in order to allow me to avoid (hopefully) unnecessary conditional URL-handling logic in the template). Is this possible at all? If not, is there an elegant way of handling it inside a template?

Answer 1

If you want to "redirect" all parent entries of your structure that have child entries, you could do something like this in your navigation (untested code!):

<ul>
    {% nav page in pages %}
        <li>

            {% if page.getChildren()|length %}
                <a href="{{ page.getChildren().first().url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
            {% else %}
                <a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
            {% endif %}

            {% ifchildren %}
                <ul>
                    {% children %}
                </ul>
            {% endifchildren %}

        </li>
    {% endnav %}
</ul>

If you want to exclude specific parent entries from that behavior, you could do this like so:

{% if page.getChildren()|length and page.id('and, not 1, not 2, not 3') %}