Website address redirect?

Question

URL Handling

Good time of the day!
There is a site, almost on one HTML, which has a fairly branched structure. There is an understanding that with the development of the site further, the structure will only grow. But at the same time, I want to give the user the address not in the form
httr://site_name/subfolder/subfolder/subfolder/topic of interest.htm
but at
httr://site_name/topic of interest.
At the same time, I want to redirect from old pages to new addresses so that Do not lose results from search queries, because search engines until they reindex, I will throw it at the old addresses, and you never know who has already saved it to bookmarks, etc.
Using mod rewrite to redirect from httr://sitename/subfolder/subfolder/subfolder/topic of interest.htm to http://sitename/topic of interest is not a problem, but if someone accesses httr://sitename/topic of interest directly, they will get thump ( Interrupting the entire site with a loss of structure in order to create folders httr://site_name/topic of interest/index.htm desire is not enough, the hierarchy helps a lot.
Now the question is, I don’t have enough knowledge of mod rewrite to implement the idea, or do I need others here methods?Yes, transfer everything to the CMS option, but so far there is no time and energy for this.What other options can there be?

Answer 1

You are right in the last paragraph! You need to study mod rewrite. It, of course, allows you to “redirect from httr://site_name/subfolder/subfolder/subfolder/topic of interest.htm to httr://site_name/topic of interest” and “directly to httr://site_name/topic of interest” apply .
I can sketch a rough design a little later.