Need a "redirection facility" in PHP

[PHP_tyro]

Hi.

 

I'm at the very early stages of my PHP learning, and find myself needing something that's beyond me at this stage. Hopefully someone can come to the rescue with appropriate code.

 

What I need is a redirection facility on a WordPress site.

 

Somewhere on the site might be a link that looks like this:

http://www.mysite.com/news/

 

But I don't want there to be a page or folder called "news". Instead, in the redirection facility, "news" is associated with say the URL https://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/, and so clicking on http://www.mysite.com/news/ automatically jumps to the New York Times page in a new browser tab.

 

There might be many such redirections, so I don't want a separate page or folder for each one. Ideally I could just enter the keyword ("news") and the target URL (https://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/) into a lookup list.

 

I could do this easily in ASP, but now I'm moving to Linux hosts (better for WordPress) I need to get it done in PHP.

 

Any assistance much appreciated.