Magento Controllers: Redirecting to External URLs

Written in 2009. It may still be useful, but tools and my own views have probably moved on since.

Just a quick one. If you need to redirect to a URL outside of your regular Magento Base then its no use using:

$this->_redirect($path)

..instead use:

$this->_redirectUrl($url)

The only time to use the _redirect variant would be to redirect to an internal module/controller/action/param1/param1value page, where as _redirectUrl is geared towards your external URLs.

Back to work!