How can I update my permalink structure in wordpress?

Question

This is the old url of my blog (wp 2.2) http://myblog.com/category-name/post-name

ex. http://myblog.com/shoes/i-like-shoes

and Im trying to change it to http://myblog.com/post-id/post-name.html

ex. http://myblog.com/717/this-is-my-first-post.html

Im moving my content from wp2.2 to wp2.8 and i want to change all the categories for the current content from whatever it is now to "classic"

The problem of course is that some of my pages have a high page rank and I need to maintain this...

this is becoming a headache for me to figure out.

your help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Go to: http://myblog.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php. Or, if you want to navigate manually :), go to your wordpress dashboard. In the Settings menu go to "Permalinks".

Also see http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks for more detail, especially the fields for making custom permalinks.

Edit

To quote the above,

Using %category% with multiple categories on a post, or %tag%

When you assign multiple categories to a post, only one can show up in the permalink. This will be the lowest numbered category (see Manage Categories). The post will still be accessible through all the categories as normal.

The same thing applies to using the %tag% field in your permalink structure.

So... As long as "classic" is the lowest numbered category you use, that will work as the category name in the permalink.

Your change in structure however will break any external links pointing to your posts so your page rank is going to change as well. Unfortunately you need to choose which is more important: changing to permalinks without category names, or maintaining the pagerank of old posts.

Answer 2

If you just changed category names, you can do a redirect in htaccess for just the category name, IF the rest of your URL structure remains the same, i.e. date and post name.

If you changed more than just a cateory name, or don't want to mess around with htaccess, then use something like the Redirection plugin to easily handle redirects.