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I changed the permalink structure from /%category%/%postname%/ to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%//

How can I redirect all old posts to the new ones (eg: via htaccess)?

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  • You don't need to redirect, it's all done automatically by WordPress. As far as I understand it, WP saves your posts in the DB by their post ID's and generates the pretty permalinks on the fly based on your permalink settings. – akTed Jan 26 '13 at 20:20
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    @AKTed While visiting the post at the new permalink will work fine, visiting the old permalink will result in a 404 error – shea Jan 26 '13 at 20:21
  • Ahhh, wasn't thinking of that, thanks. Yoast has a .htaccess redirect generator, but I haven't tried it yet. – akTed Jan 26 '13 at 20:23
  • You can't do this with .htaccess, as it can't know the category or post date of the post – shea Jan 26 '13 at 20:27
  • @AKTed Yoast's redirect generator only works when changing the structure to /%postname%/ – shea Jan 26 '13 at 20:27
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WordPress should handle the 301 redirects for you automatically in this case. It doesn't always, but it should here.

Long story short, WordPress has a function, redirect_guess_404_permalink which tries to find the correct post when it encounters a 404 by using the end of the 404 url to query against the wp_posts.post_name. If it finds a post, it will perform a 301 redirect. In your particular case, because your old structure ends in %postname%, this should very reliably 301 all your old paths.

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You can also redirect via WP. Yes, the htaccess variant is with better performance, but a small plugin is easy to use.

Use the Hook template_redirect and check for the conditional function is_404(); if true, than get the right permalink and rewrite. Also you can use the small plugin Change Permalink Helper.

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