I currently have an existing website running on an old custom CMS engine and I would like to migrate my website to wordpress. My main concern is 404 links after migration to wordpress. How can I gather all internal links from the existing website so I know what to migrate to wordpress without fail? Is there an easy and fast way to do this? I have many pages (100+) to manually port over (cut and paste).
Migrating from Custom CMS to WordPress
You can use Wget to fetch the whole website and from the log file to get all urls.
When you create the content in WordPress you can choose the url of the page (called ‘slug’).
If you can programaticly get the content from your current site you can insert the existing pages to wordpress using XML-RPC protocol.
That way you can enter the slug with the content and posibly keep urls unchanged.
Another option is using a redirect plugin such as REDIRECT though that might by too much work for 100 pages.
As stated in the prvious answer you can program the redirections yourself, it’s quite easy with wordpress.
You should be able to do all this programatically. WordPress is extremely easy to program for operations like this.
You need to see what you want to import : Title, content, etc., + permalink. Permalink is the URL of the post. You can actually save that with the posts in WordPress, so you should not have any problem if this information is stored in your old CMS. You can perfectly transfer it along the way. To take an example, some migration plugins from Drupal to WordPress import the posts in WordPress and keep the URLs they had in Drupal : so it is indeed possible.
Your test case in this situation is simple : export a post from your old CMS and try to use its data to create a new one in WordPress. All with a PHP script. I am sure you will succeed. If you do, just loop through all your old posts and it will fly.
First you should migrate source page aliases to WordPress post slug, it’s in the wp_posts table (post_name field). If this is ok, WordPress will redirect it without any problem.
Also you can try gConverter.