Moving WordPress from /blog/ to /wordpress/

Actually, in your case the “documentation” should be this:
1. admin > Settings > General: change the two URL values; Save
2. don’t worry about the error message
3. do NOT try to see your blog
4. see #3
5. via FTP, rename the directory blog to wordpress
done.

All the old external links will get a nice big 404 – unless you use a htaccess to redirect them to the new location.

4. see #3 – is a joke, sorry. Most people don’t read and follow #3 from my list above and want to see their blog at that stage; and because they see only error, they panic… and do stupid things.

– I am not a htaccess expert, you will have to google or find somebody else to help you.

– No need to mess with the database. Nobody ever knows or cares what the name of your database is!

the htaccess redirects are for google results and bookmarks as much as they are for anything else.

search/replace on your database fixes your own posts, but it doesn’t fix people’s bookmarks.

In order to avoid redirecting people from your site to your site, I suggest doing both the search and replace *and* the htacess 301 redirection.

The nice thing about 301 (permanent) redirections is that once people or search engines use those redirects once, they won’t be required anymore, so you could leave them there for a few months and optionally choose to remove that.

If your old posts still had old links in them, you’d have to keep the redirects there forever.

IMO, do both.

yeesh, if you’re changing your permalink structure to date-based at the same time, you’ll be doing more than can be covered by searching and replacing.

in fact, you’ll be doing more than can be covered easily using htaccess as well.

got many posts? I have a feeling you’ll be redirecting them one-by-one in your htaccess file, that is… unless your old permalinks were the query-string kind… and not another form of pretty permalinks.

query string format will continue to work, so the redirection becomes a little easier.

nothing. as I said above, when you change permalinks from standard to something else, the standard ones will *continue* working, as well as your new format.

it’s only a real problem if you change from one type of pretty permalink structure to another.

the deal is though, that if you want google to trawl your posts and see your old links in the new format, then you’ll have to change them manually – search and replace won’t do you any good.

again, they WILL keep working, so you don’t really *need* to do anything, and if you do anything at all, it will all be manual, and all your redirects will have to be quite unique, because you’re your old query-style links have nothing descriptive in them.

its easy to change /blog/apples/oranges to /wordpress/oranges/apples… but how will you know if ?p=324 relates to apples or oranges, programatically? the answer is, you can’t.