Advanced Permalinks dashboard screenshot

Yesterday I decided to change the permalinks structure of this site. I wondered if WordPress had redirection built into to the core, but it seems it does not yet. But there are many plugins, like always, providing the needed functionlity. At first I looked at one called Redirection, but it was not really what I was after. If seems to do most things one could want regarding redirects and 404 logging, but I only wanted to simply redirect my old “YYYY/MM/DD/postname” structure to “/postname”. I then tried another plugin called Advanced Permalinks, which does exactly what I wanted. After installing it, its options/functionality is found under Settings->Permalinks->Migration in the WordPress administration dashboard.

This allows you to move from one permalink structure to another one, and have the old structure be forwarded to the new, for each post. I used the “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/” structure before, but I switched to the “/%postname%/” structure. Now, with the Advanced Permalinks plugin my possible old links in to my articles are forwarded properly.

The second plugin I installed and tried yesterday was Optimize DB, a simple plugin that just does what the name says, optimizes the MySQL database with one click. Seems to do its work well too. For my little site it wasn’t that much to optimize, but a few kilobytes atleast.

The third plugin I installed, and which you can see the effects of in this post, is Lightbox Plus, which handles the viewing of images fullsize in an overlay frame using javascript, instead of opening the image directly. Click on the image in this post and see.

Are you using any of these plugins and have anything to add? leave a comment.