I recently moved the Fridley Farmer content from this site over to http://fridleyfarmer.com, and wanted to move all of my content over there too. There are plenty of instructions on moving wordpress sites available online, I did a full database dump, copied all the files, then deleted the non Fridley Farmer content from the new site. You can also use the Import/Export functionality to export just a single category, but I didn’t know if that would include my pictures and comments as well, so I just copied everything.
What wasn’t obvious however, was how to redirect users to my new content! I didn’t want real users visiting stuporglue.org for the Fridley Farmer content anymore, but I didn’t want to send EVERYONE (like you!) over to the new site. I also didn’t want Google thinking that my new site just had duplicate content.
I ended up making three changes to my wordpress install in order to make the transition as seamless as possible.
Header Redirects on Single Posts and The Cateogry
In theme’s header.php I added a short bit of PHP that would detect users trying to visit the Fridley Farmer category archive, or any post in the Fridley Farmer category. It performs a 301 Moved Permanently HTTP header redirect. Easy peasy.
<?php
if( is_single() && in_category('Fridley Farmer') ){
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
$newsite = "http://fridleyfarmer.com" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header ('Location: '. $newsite);
}else if( is_category('Fridley Farmer') ) {
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
$newsite = "http://fridleyfarmer.com" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header ('Location: '. $newsite);
}
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html ...
Replace Category Content With a “We’ve Moved” Message
I edited the code in wp-includes/post-template.php to modify the post’s content as it’s returned.
I changed:
function the_content($more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = 0) {
$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser);
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
echo $content;
}
Into:
function the_content($more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = 0) {
if(in_category("Fridley Farmer")){
$content = "<p>The Fridley Farmer has moved its wagon down the road to
<a href='http://fridleyfarmer.com'>http://fridleyfarmer.com</a>. All of our
belongings, posts and content have arrived safely, and we're just waiting for
you!.</p>
<p>Stuporglue.org will remain as a place for all my programming and other
non-gardening related ramblings.</p>
<p>So, update your links, tell all your friends and come check out the new site!</p>";
} else {
$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser);
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
}
echo $content;
}
Replace Post Title Links With Link to New Site
In wp-includes/link-template.php I edited the very end of the function get_permalink. I made it so that links to Fridley Farmer content go to the new site.
return apply_filters('post_link', $permalink, $post, $leavename);
}
Into:
$finalurl = apply_filters('post_link', $permalink, $post, $leavename);
require_once('category-template.php');
if(in_category('Fridley Farmer',get_the_ID())){
$finalurl = str_replace(home_url(),'http://fridleyfarmer.com',$finalurl);
}
return $finalurl;
}
I hope that helps someone out. It wasn’t difficult, but I couldn’t find how to do something like this documented anywhere.
It will probably get overwritten the next time I upgrade WordPress, but hopefully by then everyone who needs to know to go to the new site will already have done so.
