Redirect individual URLs from old site

  • Unknown's avatar
    chipotlecoyote · Member ·

    I’m planning to convert an existing web site to a group blog at WordPress.com; the group blog will take the same domain name (clawandquill.net). But I’d like to have the URLs currently at clawandquill.net that don’t directly map to WordPress.com URLs be able to be redirected, so any existing links to articles don’t break. Is there any way to do this?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    thatrobyn · Member ·

    Hello there,

    Please give me some examples of URLs you’d like to map.

    If the links are mainly pages, posts, and menu links, the export from your self-hosted site, and the import into WordPress.com should make this conversion for you.

    However, if these links are ones you manually entered into the body or your posts and pages, we may need to find another solution.

    Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks very much.

  • Unknown's avatar
    chipotlecoyote · Member ·

    I wrote “existing web site,” not “existing WordPress site.” That’s where the sticky part is. :) Currently the site is not running on WordPress; it’s running on a custom CMS. So for instance, a current article has the URL:

    http://clawandquill.net/issue/1/welcome

    and the static about page is at:

    http://clawandquill.net/page/about

    In the new WordPress site, these are likely to change. (And the Atom/RSS feed URL is probably different, too, although I haven’t checked.) What I’d like is for the old URLs to redirect to whatever the new ones are going to be.

    There’s only likely to be three posts and four or five static pages I need to set up redirects for. I’m sure there’s probably a self-hosted WordPress plugin that lets you just enter these manually (although I suppose if it were self-hosted, I’d just add these to an .htaccess file or the like), but I don’t know if there’s a way to do that on the wordpress.com hosted version.

  • Unknown's avatar
    thatrobyn · Member ·

    Aha!

    This does complicate matters. WordPress.com isn’t really set up to work this way. You were right on the money: if you had a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you’d be able to install the plugins you’d need.

    If you really want to stick with WordPress.com, my suggestion would be to ask your domain registrar if they have any re-direction solutions for multiple pages. My only concern with this is that they *might* require IP addresses and that’s not how we map. We’d ask that you use nameservers. Still, they might have some ideas.

    If this doesn’t pan out, you may look into self-hosting via WordPress.org. I can certainly help with any questions or concerns you may have. It sounds as if you’ve educated yourself pretty thoroughly with self-hosting, but if I can assist further, please do let me know.

    Please let me know what happens with your domain registrar! Thanks so much. Best to you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    chipotlecoyote · Member ·

    Thanks. It doesn’t look like Hover is capable of doing this redirection on their end, so I’m going back to the self-hosting idea, I think. I actually already have a virtual server capable of running WordPress, and got things installed and (apparently) running happily.

  • Unknown's avatar
    thatrobyn · Member ·

    Hello again!

    That is terrific. It sounds like self-hosting will best suit your needs. If you need any assistance on the WordPress.com end, please do let me know.

    When you’re ready to go live, you may want to use the Jetpack plugin. That will give you lots of the same features that come with a WordPress.com. There are some pretty great tools here:

    http://jetpack.me

    Let me know if you have any other questions. Cheers!

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