Changing Permalink type mid blog — Trouble?

Maybe I wasn’t clear?

Let me try phrasing the question again:

If I change my permalink structure, will I wipe out my earlier (former) permalinks? Or will the change only take effect with new posts?

Thanks,
kwc

Thanks, Ian.

Do I understand that all posts are saved as both /?p=number AND /nice-post-name when I select “custom” permalinks and tell it to save them as http://www.mindbodyspiritjournal.com/nice-blog-name?

Or is it that WordPress still knows the order in which posts were created/published and so i could still, in wp-admin, locate posts by their sequential number?

Thanks,
kwc

P.S. If it’s the former, and they are saved as both /?p=number and /nice-post-name, then do the search engines index each post both ways?

OK. I was able to return to “default.” Which just has the post slugs appearing as http://www.mindbodyspiritjournal.com/?p=number”. So the blog is working again.

But what path do I need to write in order to select “custom” and have future posts use a custom slug such as” http://www.mindbodyspiritjournal.com/custom-slug-would-fit-here ??

And, of course, I want to do that without breaking the blog…

I think I’m getting that I need to put only /slug in the input box instead of the full path as I did before. But what magic word exactly needs to replace “slug” in the example above in order for WordPress to know to use the smart slugs?

Thanks,
kwc

Got it!

Yes. It works both ways. It automatically uses a smart tag based on the title for EVERY post AND, if I type in /?p=number, it calls up posts.

Super.

ok, dspiral. here’s what i did:

go to options/permalinks

under “common options,” select “custom” and type in:
/%category%/%postname%

that will give you what i have now…. a url with the blog url, category and postname.

in addition, wordpress automatically creates a version in the default post-number format. so you don’t lose any google indexed pages when you make this switch.

hope that helps.

best,
kwc