[wp-pro] Re: wp-pro Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9

[Scot Hacker]

On Nov 11, 2007, at 4:00 AM, wp-pro-request at lists.automattic.com wrote:

> I'm trying to move from MT to WP, but I have a major stumbling block.
> My URLs look like this:
>
> www.example.com/posts/001234.shtml
>
> The 1234 is the postid. To preserve my URLs I need to be able to move
> the post IDs from MT to WP. Note that you can't simply import the
> posts to WP and assume the IDs are the same - they won't be because of
> deleted posts. I'm not worried about the leading zeroes. I can fix
> that with Apche's mod_rewrite.
>
> I'd like to avoid having to use redirects. I have over 4000 posts,
> lots of internal links, and lots of inbound links that boost my Google
> PageRank and bring search engine traffic.
>
> Any ideas? I'd pay someone to help me with this.

There are pretty good instructions for dealing with this situation here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress

(see Preserving Permalinks). It's a bit technical, but it works fine,  
and your new WP install won't be constrained to keep the numerical  
IDs. It does involve redirects - no way around that. You'll end up  
with a 4000-line .htaccess, which obviously requires some overhead to  
parse. My advice is to keep that big .htaccess in place for the first  
few months, then, assuming search engines have all caught up to the  
new URLs, remove it to improve performance.

./s


--
Scot Hacker, Webmaster
Graduate School of Journalism
UC Berkeley
http://journalism.berkeley.edu