a generous designer’s blog

Updated my Wordpress to the latest 2.7 version. It was a few minutes, as always. The bigger issue was to change my permalink structure.

The old one looked like this:

agenerousdesigner.com/blog/blog-posts-title-20081231

It looks now a bit useless, but I had a whole concept when it was created. First of all, i didn’t like the over-segmented /year/month/day/post-title form. I thought that the title is the most important, and the date must be also represented but at the end. Of course in this case the date format was a wrong decision.

The new structure is a default Wordpress option and it fits now my requirements:

agenerousdesigner.com/blog/2008/12/31/blog-post-title

But there’s a big problem with the search engine and user friendly links: you cannot change the structure the way you want or when you want. That wasn’t a problem in the good old days when we used ?p=3621763. It was always the same, meaningless link.

Luckily there’s a useful wordpress plugin for this, so you don’t have to maintain the old redirects in the .htaccess file “manually” (redirecting the redirects… :-s ).

You can download the Permalink Redirect Wordpress plugin at Scott Yang’s Playground, the developer’s website. (I didn’t find it on Wordpress.org)

You have to type in the previous permalink structure for the plugin to work. Also you can list special urls that will be excluded from the redirection, or specify urls where the old or the new did not follow the structure and you want to pair them manually.

Now all your links are handled, and visitors can find you, even if they bookmarked or followed an outdated link.

My note: if you change your post’s title several times while writing, don’t forget to check your permalink! It seems that Wordpress does not follow the changes! Or at least when you edit it at least once.