markdefacto

No one ever responded but here is the solution I came up with. I found what things are unique to cutenews and won’t appear in a wordpress url and wrote something in .htaccess. It captures the unique article id or the unique category id from cutenews and passes them to a php script I made called cutenewsredirect.php. cutenewsredirect.php in turn redirects them to the correct website giving the 301 (moved permanently) status.

.htaccess:

# redirect the old cutenews articles
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)(subaction|start_from)(.*)id=([0-9]+)(.*)
RewriteRule ^.* https://www.newsite.com/cutenewsredirect.php?article=%4 [L]

# redirect the old cutenews categories
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)category=([0-9]+)(.*)
RewriteRule ^.* https://www.newsite.com/cutenewsredirect.php?cutecats=%2 [L]

cutenewsredirect.php:

<?php
switch ($_GET["article"])
{
        case "3141592":
                Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
                Header("Location: https://www.newsite.com/pi-is-great");
        break;

        case "8675309":
                Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
                Header("Location: https://www.newsite.com/a-new-page/");
        break;

}
switch ($_GET["cutecats"])
{
        case "1":
                Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
                Header("Location: https://www.newsite.com/category/foobar/");
        break;
}

?>