Change permalinks on move from one site to another

Question

I'm in the finishing stages of moving a site from Wordpress.com to a privately hosted .org installation.

I've purchased the site-redirect upgrade and this is working fine, however on the new installation I have (and would like to have) a different permalink structure to the one offered on .com.

I need to find a way to redirect on the new site, from the old permalink structure to the new (/%postname%-%post_id%.html).

To make things more difficult, I'm running on IIS6 (sorry) and using the Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite plugin to use .htaccess - which has a different syntax to mod_rewrite. Docs are here: http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/doc/

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

I don't know how the IIS rewrites will impact things, but outside of that, I would recommend:

1. Use Dashboard -> Tools -> Export to export your site content from the .com site
2. Setup the identical permalink structure on the .org site
3. Use `Dashboard -> Tools -> Import to **import your site content to the .org site
4. Then change your permalink structure

This way, you can take advantage of the built-in WordPress permalink redirection functionality.

By setting up the .org site permalink structure identically to the .com site permalink structure, when you import the content, the permalinks will initially be set up identically. That (should) allow your .com redirect plugin to redirect correctly.

Then, when you change your permalink structure on the .org site, WordPress will apply metadata in order to redirect properly from the old permalink structure to the new permalink structure. That way, the process should work like so:

1. User requests old permalink from .com site
2. The .com site redirects to the old permalink at the .org site
3. The .org site receives the request for the old permalink, and serves the correct, new permalink

Answer 2

I'm not sure how well it will play with IIS, but Redirection should allow you to choose a new structure and have all existing permalinks 301 to the new structure.