The Fix: Upgrading to WordPress from Textpattern

I have a friend who wants to upgrade to WordPress and the work is currently under way. She has a personal journal, but would like to reach a wider readership. With over 200 posts, I expect her readership to grow 4-5 folds. I have read many accounts of readership going up 3-4 folds when upgrading to WordPress.

Textpattern is a rather primitive system and upgrading to WordPress from it is not easy. I wanted to tackle the problem of upgrading the URL when the old blog is configured to show only the title after the domain name.

I have begun using the following method to publish my blogs: category/date/title. The category is an extra bit of SEO crunchiness, as long as your categories are well defined. Together we decided to go for it and upgrade her URL structure.

So my friend has 200300+ posts indexed by title only. I need a way to patch her blog so that 404 errors return the actual content the person meant to find. This will also be useful for all those people who link to her entries from their personal journal.

In a business context changing your URLs without managing the traffic coming from the already indexed pages is suicide!

I will be testing redirection, a WordPress plugin that is supposed to do this. Please point me in the direction of any other plugin that does one or both of the following:

1) Automatic redirect
Capture the old URL and search the database for a match. If found, redirect the browser to the correct page immediately. If not, send the browser to the front page.

2) Intermediate page
Capture the old URL and display a list of posts that match the query.

Always, capture every 404 error with origin for further study and action.

Option #2 is what the redirection plugin promises to do. It may not be interesting for a blog with a constant topic such as tennis, gardening or cooking. If there are a lot of posts with vague personal titles compromised of only one word, the resulting list might be huge!