a timocracy of one

Lars Pind’s redirect_routing plugin fills a gaping whole in rails routing’s claim to be an apache mod_rewrite replacement. With a simple

map.redirect 'old_path', the_usual_options_like_controller_and_action

you can handle redirecting old urls to the new rails functionality, or whatever else you want to do a redirect for.

My only problem was, since the plugin creates a controller to do this (behind the scenes, of course), it raised a “missing default helper path” warning on starting up the server. That was easily resolved by adding an matching, empty helper, and then submitting as much as a patch, which Lars applied pretty much immediately, so it seems he’s on the ball.