What to do about my existing .php pages when coming to WP

  • I have an existing site on a stone age host with CMS sitebuilder 4.5.0 and no way to upgrade. The urls on my site end in .php , not because I want them to but because that’s how my present setup does it. I don’t have any control over it.

    I need a real CMS and ability to make nice pages. BUT, I need to preserve the old URLs. I don’t care about the functionality of the old pages – the template sucks. But I need to preserve the urls I have lots of good links coming in I can’t lose connection to those.

    What this seems to mean is that wherever I go now – I have to have the ability to have the urls end with “.php”.

    I went ahead and got a new host, installed wordpress, and started to build a local test site – just playing around. The idea is I’ll copy all the text from the old site manually.

    But when I create new pages, WordPress does not let me have pages end n the extension “.php”. When I try I get “-php”.

    The answers I am getting from host are increasinly cryptic and evasive even though I indicated that this was what I was going to be doing from the beginning.

    If I have pages that end in .php right now, am I basically out of luck with WordPress? Is there another CMS that supports having .php extensions?

    Again, I don’t care about the functionality of .php I don’t really even know that it is. I just have an existing site with .php in the name of the pages and I need to preserve the links from outside I can’t lose them.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • You don’t have to keep the PHP file extension – what you would need is some way to do redirects – these allow you do to basically tell the browser that the old file has moved to a new location.

    For example, if you have a page called “oldpage.php”, you could put in a redirect to “newpage”.

    WordPress has a number of redirect plugins, such as Safe Redirect Manager which will enable you to set all this up. I believe Safe Redirect Manager also does wildcards, so you could set it up to redirect from a .php to one without a file extension automatically. I’ve not done anything like that with it myself – a bit of care might be needed in setting it up so that you don’t break WordPress itself – but it should be doable.

    Alternatively, you can specify each redirect individually – although whether you want to do this depends on how big your site it.

    This is probably going to be the easiest way of solving your issue – other systems will have similar functionality.

    Thread Starter Eric Weibel

    (@eric-weibel)

    Thanks Andrew. That is extremely helpful thanks.

    So it sounds like if I don’t want to maintain two hosts, I have to have a .php page with the same name on new host – but that will be outside of the scope of WordPress. And each such page will have a redirect associated with it that will take them to a new page that I can name the same just not having the .php extension. And those new pages without .php will be within the scope of WordPress.

    Is that correct?

    Almost. If you have it all on the same host, then you don’t need the original .php file – the redirect will sort it out for you.

    Thread Starter Eric Weibel

    (@eric-weibel)

    Thanks Andrew.

    Thread Starter Eric Weibel

    (@eric-weibel)

    I was wondering if there was a good plugin you could recommend for this? I have played with plugins that seem to be designed to redirect away from pages that exist in wordpress (Quick Page/Post Redirect by Don Fischer). But they do not appear to be configured to redirect from a soon-to-be-non-existent .php page to a wordpress page on my site.

    I’ve tried a couple, but recently settled on the Redirection plugin. It allows you to set up any URL to redirect, and you can import and export data as well.

    Well worth checking out.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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