stanordan

I would try modifying the site URL from the config file. It is also possible that there are some hard links left over in the database. I would consider using a link checker to check for 404 errors.

If you have not already, you can try setting the www redirect as part of the site title. This should redirect newly created URLs to the www as you hoped.

If you have already checked the PHP version you may need to restore/replace the core files. The 500 error is pretty vague.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by stanordan.

If you are trying to do relative linking in order to move content around more easily or changing permalinks without having to redirect old URLs you could do the reverse:

<a href="?p=1234">Another link</a>

The link above will automatically convert into whatever the current permalink structure is if that post or page exists in the database.

This is helpful because you can avoid getting 404 errors if you had old URL lying around or bookmarked somewhere.

I’m not sure if using the category in your URL will have a directly positive effect, but if you choose to do that you will want to be careful to use canonical URLs. This means that the post or page is only available on that URL. It can dilute your SEO efforts if you have the same content available on two different URLs. For example, if you have the same post in two categories it would be available on two different URLs. This would create duplicate content — which can be problematic for search enginges. The Yoast SEO plugin helps with this.

I cannot speculate as to how, but it is possible you are missing some core files. You may want to consider replacing core files.

It is highly likely the effect we observe in the link you provided is done with Javascript. Searching for a plugin that will replicate the effect exactly may not provide many results. However, there seem to be a good deal of plugins that can allow you to add Javascript without editing source files. I found one in the plugin directory that may be helpful to you.

Alternatively, you would want to search for a Javascript developer who could “enqueue” the necessary scripts into your theme.

Dealing with older content is certainly an issue a lot of users must face. I am not sure exactly how major news sites do it, but as a general purpose solution you can consider creating a custom taxonomy. You can name this taxonomy something like “archives”, for example, and assign it to the older posts and pages. Or, you can assign a taxonomy for “new” posts. Either way, you can use this as a method of filtering posts and pages, so you don’t have to do deal with a full load of content at once.