Trying to Find a Fool Proof Way of Changing Permalinks

2008 Oct 30 at 04:25 » Tagged as :wordpress, python,

The other day, I changed the permalinks structure in my photo blog. I wasn't getting a lot of traffic  there, so I wasn't too worried about things going wrong. Well, they did go wrong. I used dean's permalink migration plugin (because it was the one recommended in a couple of articles I read on the topic)  to redirect the old links to the new ones. The plugin worked marvelously well for individual entries, but it couldn't handle the monthly archives and I had to modify the .htaccess file to include a couple of rewrite rules to redirect those links manually.

For this blog, I don't want the old entries to be redirected at all. The old links should remain the way they are (numeric) and the new ones should have the title in the link. That's because many old posts are ranked high in google. Changing their URLs might result in them dropping off.

At first I thought of writing my own plug-in oto achieve this but a good geek doesn't write anything if he can avoid it. So I looked around again and found the advanced permalinks migration plugin which at first sight seemed to do the job just right.

On closer inspection I found that the category archives broke the moment the plugin was enabled. Great pity because it has just the features that I am looking for and the author seems to have put in a lot of effort for it. However it's said to be compatible with wordpress version 2.50 or older and the current version is 2.63. So there you are, it doesn't always pay to be lazy.