Redirections in WordPress [en]

When I moved the Going Solo site away from WordPress.com (which did its job well, btw) so that I could jiggle it around and make the Lausanne and Leeds events into separate sites, I ended up with a whole bunch of URLs like http://going-solo.net/programme which actually referred to the Lausanne event, and needed to point to http://lausanne08.going-solo.net/programme.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that I’m not shy to go and fiddle around with my .htaccess file, but I’m also getting increasingly lazy as the years go by. So, here are two WordPress plugins (well, one isn’t strictly a plugin, but let’s not get tangled up in semantics) which can come in handy:

  • Redirection plugin: use this when you just need a 301/302 (prefer the latter) redirect/move — if you head to http://going-solo.net/programme, you’ll see it at work. It has a handy interface to let you manage all your redirects, and also does 404 logging for you. I’ve discovered (and fixed) quite a few broken links since I installed it.
  • “Redirect to” page template (thanks, Mark): this is actually a page template which does nothing but redirect somewhere else. I use it on the main Going Solo site to create navigation tabs to Lausanne and Leeds which redirect to the other sites. Create a page with the right title, select “Redirect” as the page template, and add a custom field named “redirect” with the destination URL as value.

Have fun!