Title: Variable permalinks
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Variable permalinks

 *  [Daniel J. Summers](https://wordpress.org/support/users/danielsummers/)
 * (@danielsummers)
 * [16 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variable-permalinks/)
 * I’m working on migrating a blog. The old one had a pretty good search engine 
   footprint, so we’ve set up redirection to handle the transition to a new domain.
   I set up the permalink structure to match their old site; the structure is /article/[
   slug]. However, it seems that their old (custom) blogging platform served pages
   before a certain date without the “/article” in the front; now, clicking these
   links in search results are giving 404’s at the new blog.
 * I’d thought about changing the posts to pages (which would fix this problem),
   but they already have a nice page structure set up; so, I don’t think that’s 
   an option.
 * What I think would work is, if WordPress looks for what it thinks is a page and
   can’t find it, it would try again with “/article” on the front of it. However,
   in digging into the code, it seems that the 404 status is determined even earlier,
   when it spins through rewrite rules from the database.
 * Would it be feasible to put a small hack in there to append “/article” to the
   preg_match target? I’m still not sure how I could do that for these posts without
   messing up pages, as the 404 is determined in the WP class, and not WP_Query.
   If I could make it find the post slug, the canonical redirect should handle actually
   redirecting to the new permalink format.
 * Any constructive suggestions would be appreciated. 🙂
 * Daniel

The topic ‘Variable permalinks’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [permalink](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/permalink/)

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [Daniel J. Summers](https://wordpress.org/support/users/danielsummers/)
 * Last activity: [16 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variable-permalinks/)
 * Status: not resolved

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