Movable Type to WordPress migration: htaccess redirection issue

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I’m migrating a rather large (5000+ posts) from Movable Type to WordPress. At this point, I’m stuck trying to ensure that old post urls won’t be result in 404s once we go live with the new site.

The old url pattern looks like so:

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http://domain.com/site/category/category/post_name.php

And I’d like to redirect those to

http://domain.com/category/category/post_name/

However, I have tried and tried with htaccess redirects, and no matter what I do, it either fails or generates a 500 error. I suspect I’m missing something silly, or that there are conflicting rules maybe, and I’m hoping that someone who knows htaccess better than I do can help me along the right path.

Here’s what I’ve got right now. The rule redirecting /site/ to the root directory works just fine, but the other two have no effect, whether alone or together. I tried both to see if I could redirect a specific post and do it manually that way, but it still won’t work. 

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^site/(.*) /$1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^site/resources/(.*).php$ /resources/$1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^site/resources/research/safe_urban_form_revisiting_the_relationship_b.php$ /resources/research/safe_urban_form_revisiting_the_relationship_b/ [NC]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Any help would be extremely useful!

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3 comments

  1. It looks like you may want to use a redirect something like this:

    # Redirect /site/any/path/file.php to /any/path/file/:
RewriteRule ^site/(.+).php$ $1/ [NC,R=301,L]

    Also, I would place this as the first rule immediately after the RewriteBase / line in the WordPress section.

  2. Since you´ll keep the same domain, why don’t you just forget about writing the redirection rules yourself and use the redirection plugin instead? It will be much easier for you to define the redirection rules with the help of the plugin. This is the strategy I follow every time I can

  3. The reason your redirects aren’t working as expected is that . is a special character in Regular Expressions’ syntax — it means “any character”. You need to escape any special characters like ., ^, etc. with a backslash like so: ..

    # BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /

    # Redirect old URLs with ".php" in them.
    RewriteRule ^site/(.+).php$ $1/ [NC,R=301,L]

    RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

    I’m not sure if you actually want the RewriteRule ^site/(.*) /$1 [NC] rule in there or if it was just testing. If you do, just add it in after the RewriteBase / statement.