So as I’m working on the upcoming redesign, it hit me. If I reorganize all my content, make some entries fall under ‘blog’ and some under ‘articles’, the permalinks for some of my popular stuff will no longer work. You see Textpattern stores the permalinks as domain.com/section/blog-title . So if I create a new section entitled ‘articles’ and move some stuff there from the section titled ‘blog’ the actual permalinks will be different. That’s no good.
Only a couple of things i’ve written have been minutely popular (How NOT to steal a design, The Best and the Weirdest in Web Design ’06 are the two biggest), but I would HATE for all that backlink, hard to get traffic to just disappear because I reorganized.
I have to admit, this site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, so what works shouldn’t be tinkered with. I figure these are my options:
1. Reorganize anyway, and come up with a decent error page
This approach might actually work fairly well for a site this size. If I do decide to go ahead and reorganize, and Textpattern renames all my permalinks, I could come up with a bulletproof error page that is more than the standard 404 This page cannot be displayed.
On the error page I could include a list of the most popular entries (say 3-5), along with a tag cloud and a search field.
2. Just reorganize the new stuff
I could just leave all the entries where they are, and just organize the new stuff. This method would be the easiest and the laziest, and is probably what I’ll do until I figure out something better.
3. Dig deep into Textpattern and find the solution the right way
I’m sure I’m not the first site owner who has utilized Textpattern and come across this very problem. So my immediate goal is to get in touch with the TXP community and see what they say about it.
It’s probably a lot easier than I’m thinking….these types of things usually are.
Comments
Rommert
It’s possible to do a mod_rewrite on the /articles/etc. url right?
I mean. It could be solved with a simple htaccess script.
Unfortunately, I’m anything but a htaccess guru so I can’t help you on this one, but I’m fairly sure it’s possible.
Christopher Scott
I’m not sure rom. I’ve never really dealt with htaccess before so I’d be hesitant to mess with it.
Greg Brooks
I’ve helped several friends move stuff over from Movable Type (with ugly URLs) to WP (with pretty URLs) and developed .htaccess files to handle the redirection – and trust me, I’m no guru. Shoot me an email if you’d like some thoughts and a sample .htaccess file to use as a guide.
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Friday, March 2, 2007
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