Recently we had a client who wanted to change their Permalink structure from

Old Permalink structure: /%author%/%category%/%postname%/

to:

New Permalink structure: /%author%/%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/

so that they would qualify for Google News. Apparently you need at least 3 digits in your URL in order to qualify for Google News.

I wanted to simply change the Permalink structure by going to Settings>Permalinks in WordPress. However, the problem is that Google sees 2 URLs for the same post which could cause Google to penalize you for duplicate content:

Google would see both the old and new Permalink structure for the same content:

For example, Google would see:

(old) http://example.com/Rebecca/News/MyPost/

and

(new) http://example.com/Rebecca/News/MyPost/222

So we need to make sure the old Permalink structure has a 301 redirect to the new Permalink structure.

Thankfully, after trying many plugins, we finally found and successfully implemented this plugin: Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin

The directions on the site are very old and quite confusing.

Here’s how to use Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin

1. Download, Install and activate the plugin
2. Go to Settings>Permalinks and copy down your old permalink structure
3. While you’re in Settings>Permalinks, change the Permalink structure to your new permalink structure
4. Go to Settings>Permalink Redirect and where it says “Old Permalink Structures”, paste in your old permalink structure

That’s it.

This post was originally published at How to Change Permalink Structure in WordPress without Duplicate Content on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

You may need to have “tinyurl” permalinks for your WordPress blog posts. One option is to go to tinyurl.com and create each permalink one-by-one. This is fine if you don’t need to create too many, but can get cumbersome when you need tens or hundreds of them.

Michael Clark explains how he used Apache’s rewrite rules with WordPress’ Post ID # to create what he calls “GoTo” URLs.

Creating a “GoTo” URL For Your WordPress-Powered Site

This post was originally published at Automatically create tinyurl-type permalinks in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Weblog Tools Collection has published a good, concise guide on setting up permalinks on your WordPress blog. The tips include various permalink options, and how to set up a .htaccess file if you don’t have one.

Configuring WP Permalinks

This post was originally published at Useful guide to configuring WordPress permalinks on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.

Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:

• Filled In – Places a customized form on your site, and stores submitted data in a database. The plugin features email reporting, AJAX support, CAPTCHA support, and file uploads. The data can be exported to CSV or XML.
• Advanced Permalinks – If you decide midway to change your permalink structure to something friendlier, this generally means you have to do it sitewide and for all existing posts, which means redirecting everything. This plugin allows you to say “From now on, all posts will have permalink structure B, while posts until now will retain permalink structure A.” Can save a lot of headache.
• Search Unleashed – Makes searching WordPress blogs more user-friendly by adding the following features:
  

  • Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
  • Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
  • Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
  • Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
  • Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
  • Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
  • Record search phrases and display in a log
  • Exclude specific posts and pages from results
  • Compatible with WP-Cache
  • Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
  • No changes required to your theme

• User Permissions – Allows you to assign permissions to specific posts. This sounds like it could be good if you offer premium content on your site.
• Anti-Email Spam – Simple plugin to encode email addresses with either JavaScript or HTML entities and protect yourself against email harvesting scripts. I should have done something like this a loooong time ago.

See ‘em all at: Plugins – Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»

This post was originally published at Unique and useful WordPress Plugins at Urban Giraffe on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

We just upgraded a client’s site from WordPress 2.2. to WordPress 2.3.1. After upgrading, the theme still worked, but the links to Pages in the upper navigation bar stopped working and they all linked to the home page instead of to their pages, and an annoying error appeared at the top of every page as follows:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/wallis3/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/classes.php on line 92

In case anybody else ever encounters this problem, I found the solution after a bit of digging here in this WordPress support forum topic. It seems that some servers don’t deal well with blogs on WordPress 2.3.1 with permalinks that use /%category%/ as part of the permalink string. The server this particular site was sitting on happened to be Lunarpages.

Anyway, we removed /%category%/ from their permalink structure and updated everything in the site. Luckily the site wasn’t that old and didn’t have that much content, but it was still annoying. Update: All we had to do in the end was select the default permalink structure, click “Update Permalinks”, and then select the permalink structure that we wanted, including /%category%/, and update again, and that worked. It seems that this is a WordPress bug, and the moderators on the above support forum topic recommended submitting a bug report to WordPress, but there are so many rules to follow to submit a bug report that in the meantime I’m going to pass.

This post was originally published at Problem with class.php when upgrading to WordPress 2.3.1 on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

The following description is adapted from the creators site (lightly edited – I can’t help it!):

With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and it won’t affect your search engine rankings.

Many people want to improve their permalink structure by changing them into “pretty” permalinks, like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/

But doing so will make all pages indexed by search engines become invalid. This may cause you to lose visitors from other sites or bookmarks that link to you.

This plugin uses a 301 redirect which sends visitors or spiders at your old links to the new ones. What I wonder is if this could be used for bloggers that are moving their blogs from Blogger to WordPress, for example.

Download Dean’s Permalinks Migration Plugin Version 1.0

This post was originally published at Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.