Habitually Good

Wordpress and the open source community are just amazing. I had a long standing problem where I wanted to change the permalink structure on my blog from /index.php/archives/%postname%/ to /%postname%/ and the biggest concern that I was facing was that I didn’t want to break any of my existing Urls.

To the rescue comes the absolutely amazing plug-in by Dean Lee called the Permalink Migration Plug-in. It’s very simple to deploy (copy it and activate it). The moment you activate it, it automatically configures itself with your existing permalink structure and then you are free to go and change your Permalink structure to whatever you want.

What will happen from here on is that whenever a Url using your old structure is called, it will be re-directed to the new Url (as per the new structure). And it does so by issuing a 301 HTTP code, which tells the calling entity (browser or search engine) that it is a permanent redirect.

Well, all my Urls are pretty now.

Update: While this works like magic for Post Urls, it doesn’t work for any pages that you may have. All my pages broke… but since I didn’t have too many, that wasn’t that big a problem.

Update Again: Ok, even worse. My RSS Feed Url broke as well. So, no one was getting my feed updates. Luckily, I use FeedBurner and so was able to make a change in one place and get everything back online.

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