andrewpaulbowden

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.

OK, this seems to actually be an Apache related issue. The solution was to put

AddType application/xml .gpx

in my server config/

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.

You’ll get no argument from me about collisions.

But it is a fundamental failing of WordPress that it hardcodes /blog to site 1. Far better to put that in to a variable (I see someone even went to the extent of submitting a patch to do exactly that for v3, which didn’t seem to be picked up) and let the developer decide.

I had hoped there’d be something I can do with the database to get round it, but the more I dig the more it is clear that this is simply a system design failure. Given the many support threads I’ve found on this issue, it’s one I wish someone would bother to address!

Oh well. Crappy non-sensical blog URLs for my users it is! At least my testing has revealed that I can redirect my old MT webpages from /blog to /newblog without causing admin interface conflicts!

Has to be said, that when people design a system like this and hardcode something like that, you’ve made a bad design decision! Such things are not good. It’s the one thing I will miss about Movable Type – you can put things anywhere. Want your feeds in /ziggle/tron/ping/ directory? It’s all yours! The fact that WordPress hardcodes and mandates so much is a bit infuriating in comparison.

Still in my adventures with WordPress, I’ve found that many such things can be got round if you’re prepared to dig deep and mess around. I was rather hoping that this would be one of them – especially as it is possible to post the main site out of /blog/.

Ah, custom content types look like they’ll do the trick and will enable me to do some changes I’ve been wanting to add to the site design for ages. I’m having a play with ReedWrite – will see how it gets on.

thanks very much for the replies.