so.there.we.were

First things first, I’m writing this from the WordPress iPhone app. So far, seems really cool and pretty functional. Problem is that my blog template uses custom fields for images in a post, which are not supported. Hence the lack of images.

Anyway, I’m asking anyone reading this for WordPress advice. I’m gunning for Google News inclusion on one of my projects, but that requires that each article URL have a unique three-digit code. The URLs for that site look very similar to what I have on this site.

So, I can use the %post_id% tag in the default permalink settings, but that will change all URLs on the site, effectively breaking all incoming links to older posts and giving me a headache of 404 errors. What I need is the capability to keep the old URLs the way they are and update to the new structure for all posts going forward. And I would really like to do it without having to use a 301 redirect, either globally or on each post.

I thought I had found a plugin, “Advanced Permalinks,” that would let me designate a block of post ID numbers to follow a specific URL structure, and it did work. Right up until I changed the default permalink structure to include %post_id% and then all the URLs broke, returning 404 errors even though they were exactly as they should be. My PHP knowledge is not good enough to figure out what happened, so I’m back to square one.

This is where you, the reader who is not my mom or wife, come in. I’ve had no lightbulb moments so far and using mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file falls one step too short for doing what I need.

Thoughts? Advice? Commiseration?

UPDATE: <sarcasm>Hey! Thanks for all the help everyone, really appreciate it!</sarcasm>

Ended up having to use a 301 redirection (boooo), which shouldn’t hurt anything as it should retain the PageRank, just wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for. Everything should be kosher going foward.