I Need Some WordPress Advice

I have a plan for something I want to do with my site, and could use some advice from experienced WordPress people.

I have two legacy sites that I want to merge into my current WordPress site. Content in this site already consists of the imported content from one of these sites, plus posts I’ve made since switching over.

The other site I want to merge in has conflicting post IDs. In order to redirect old URLs to their new homes in WordPress, I need a way to resolve this conflict in a predictable fashion that can be addressed with mod_rewrite (or something comparably simple).

So I decided to apply an offset of 10,000 as I export the content from that site, so:

  • ID 15 becomes ID 10015.
  • ID 1243 becomes ID 11243.

This guarantees that there will be no conflict with any IDs in the current site.

And since the old IDs can be transformed relatively easily with regex into the new ones, I can create some mod_rewrite rules that are conditional on requests coming to the old host name, which redirect from the old URLs to the new ones. (I’ve already tested this, and it appears to work.)

So basically what I want to know is this:

Is there some reason I should not do this?

Am I painting myself into a corner?

Will the jump from ID ~2000 to ID 10001 cause any issues?

Any gotchas (SEO or otherwise) with my next post after the import starting at roughly ID 12000?

Any comments in favor or against are much appreciated! 🙂

Update: @octothorpe replies on Twitter, “@jsavin That should work, although having a lot of mod_rewrite can add serious latency. Also make the redirects 301s.” — I’m doin’ this thang…

One Comment

  1. […] all—here’s an update following my previous post asking for some WordPress advice: I pulled the trigger, and now all of the content from […]

    October 29, 2014
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