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Given Magento epitomizes TMTOWTDI in a way Larry Wall never intended, how would/should the Magento StackExchange community handle the inevitable arguments about the right way to do something.

For example: I'm a programmer, and a web developer with over 15 years experience on the web — if someone asks the "How should I handle redirect links from my old site with 25 products" question, I'm going to recommend they skip Magento's rewrite system and use .htaccess rules.

However, someone who's strictly a Magento site manager, with little programming experience, will recommend someone create rules using Magento's internal rewrite system.

Neither answer is "right", they're both hugely dependent on the context and experience of the person asking and answering. I'd like to see a site that attracts all answers — but forum experience elsewhere leads me to believe this is huge argument/troll territory.

How do we encourage a community that attracts different approaches without acrimony?

Proposal: Magento

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    I almost always implement redirects for a site migration in the .htaccess layer, and I can't even remember a time when I used Magento's rewrite system for them, work as it may. There is one big reason: performance. One does not want to wait for Magento to bootstrap simply to get a 301 response, particularly immediately after launching a major migration. That said, I have in one instance created a small module which (if a URL was ready to 404) would lookup a product, category, etc based on an old IID from the original URL and then send a 301 if found; but that was per the request of the client.
    – davidalger
    Dec 29, 2012 at 1:40
  • Correct me if I'm wrong David, but if I had thousands of redirects to handle and I added them to my .htaccess wouldn't they be getting parsed on every request, slowing the system down somewhat for all requests as opposed to just for the redirect case? Wait... what am I doing? I'm not answering the real question!
    – Tim Reynolds
    Jan 2, 2013 at 22:43
  • To answer what Tim brought up. I did this by creating a number of sub-directories with .htaccess files that have the 301's for those relevant directories. That way the redirects are not parsed for every single request.
    – Josh Pennington
    Jan 5, 2013 at 21:46

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I think the community will handle this.

In your example question, both answers will be presented to the person asking. He/She will pick the answer that best matches their experience and skill set. The community will also have their say by their upvoting of the answer that they like. Future visitors to the question will see an accepted answer by the asker and an upvoted answer and they will use that to determine which answer suits them best.

In my experience a Stack Exchange sites dont have the same argument/troll problems that forums seem to have. I think that is in part because the conversation is so well moderated by the community. If someone says something that does not drive the conversation forward, it is marked as such.

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