Magento – Redirect Home page to external url

I added the redirect commands to the top of the htaccess file and its working now. Usually try that, but must have forget before posting the question.

In Magento Enterprise the is a new module for storing url rewrite Enterprise_UrlRewrite. This module contains new tables for storing the rewrites, some layout files for the admin section, a new admin html controller and a new url matcher to name but a few items.

To understand when the enterprise system uses the new tables for saving rewrites we can first look into the controller Enterprise_UrlRewrite_Adminhtml_UrlrewriteController, here we find the function _getRedirect which is used to to load the current redirect being worked on and returns a model of type Enterprise_UrlRewrite_Model_Redirect.

If we then look into the config.xml for Enterprise_UrlRewrite you can see that it has it's own table information stored so that when the model is being used it does not use the standard community tables.

<models>
    <enterprise_urlrewrite>
        <class>Enterprise_UrlRewrite_Model</class>
        <resourceModel>enterprise_urlrewrite_resource</resourceModel>
    </enterprise_urlrewrite>
    <enterprise_urlrewrite_resource>
        <class>Enterprise_UrlRewrite_Model_Resource</class>
        <entities>
            <url_rewrite>
                <table>enterprise_url_rewrite</table>
            </url_rewrite>
            <redirect>
                <table>enterprise_url_rewrite_redirect</table>
            </redirect>
            <redirect_rewrite>
                <table>enterprise_url_rewrite_redirect_rewrite</table>
            </redirect_rewrite>
        </entities>
    </enterprise_urlrewrite_resource>
</models>

The structure of these new tables, is in my opinion vast improvement of the community editions single table, as the category and product information is moved into separate tables and also the redirect information is also separated.