Change in process of 404 error handling??

[FrankWe]

Hello all,

I reorganized the categories in my shop and replaced them with new ones and all products have been moved to the new categories. After that I added an entry in the Joomla redirect module for all the products so that the "old" links listet at Google will be redirected to the new links. After disabling the "404 error handling" in VM it is working fine and the links are being redirected to the new links. So far so good.

But the problem is now, that links to old/sold products that are no longer available in the shop will no longer be automatically redirected to a valid page within the VM shop and getting a 404 error what is bad.

So I am wondering now if there is a way to have both activated? The process should look like this.

1. Not existing link gets 404 error
2. it will then be checked if there is an entry in the Joomla redirect table for this link
3. If this is the case the new link will then be used to redirect the request
4. If no entry is available in the Joomla redirect table the request should then be redirected to the VM shop startpage

I think the logic is not complicated and it could be realized with only a few lines of code and could be very interesting for a lot of people using VM.

Maybe there is somebody who has already realized such a process.

Joomla: 3.9.23
Virtuemart: 3.6.10

Regards,
Frank