Whilst helping out with a friend’s blog that’s running WordPress, one of the issues that arised was that he had heaps of static archive files from a previous Movable Type installation that he was unable to integrate into WordPress (it’s a long story).
In the meanwhile we uploaded the archive files as they were so that Google was kept happy, but the problem remained that a bunch of the links in those static pages needed to be redirected to their WordPress equivalents – for example, the RSS feed and the search script. After a lot of noodling, hopefully the following lines of code inserted into your .htaccess file will help if you have similar problems:
Redirecting links to the RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds
Using Apache’s Redirect directive; (replace yoursite.com with the appropriate URL):
Redirect /index.rdf http://yoursite.com/feed/rdf/
Redirect /index.xml http://yoursite.com/feed/rss2/
Redirecting the Movable Type search script
This one was a pain to figure out – mod_rewrite uses the black art of regular expressions, but cutting a long story short:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} search=([^&;]*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi$ /index.php?s=%1 [R=301]
Which will take the search parameter from a request to /cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi and send a 301 Moved Permanently status code and the location of the main WordPress file – in this instance, it’s index.php.
In real life, this example:
/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?search=Hello+World
would now map to:
/index.php?s=Hello+World.