Wordpress : .htaccess , redirects and rewrite rules

[Whitey]

I posted this over in the Wordpress forum, but thought I'd pick up some inputs over here. Totally new to directing developers on redirect and rewrite rules, so I need help.

Our developers do not have strong server side admin skills [ we'll get there :) ]

Our developers just set up an .htaccess redirect over 15k+ pages.

Then I asked for a URL change to add in some keywords, to make them more SEO friendly.

The developer says it will take a week to change the WP structures and say half the site will need to be re created. Is there an easier way, relying on some re write rules / .htaccess or something?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[lucy24]

There's a bit of boilerplate that g1smd hauls out at times like this. It says, in brief, that mod_rewrite can't "make" an URL. All it can do is redirect people from one URL to another, or quietly rewrite from the visible URL to wherever the content really lives. Or, in this case, where the CMS thinks it lives.

You've just instituted a redirect, and now you want to redirect again?

Personal experience tells me that the search engines have already crawled your site. (Bing in particular has a genius for sniffing out mistakes that you thought you'd corrected before anyone noticed.) If you throw in another redirect, they will be asking for three different URLs for months to come. Those had better be some very, very juicy keywords.

[Whitey]

You've just instituted a redirect, and now you want to redirect again?

Not yet. The redirect file will need to be modified to take in the new proposed url's, but since the new site has not been deployed no redirects are in place.

I have no understanding of .htaccess so I really didn't know where this thread might head. The real problem is that the developer is worried that Wordpress, which has been set up with a different URL structure, cannot handle it without a rebuild from scratch, due to the various interplays in the development, so I loosely said server side scripting might handle it, independent from WP.

No idea really what can be done.

[g1smd]

URLs are created by links on pages. If you want a different URL structure it is the WordPress code that will have to modified.

Where htaccess helps is on a live site where URLs have been changed as above and mod_rewrite is then employed simply to redirect requests for old URLs to the new.

[Whitey]

If you want a different URL structure it is the WordPress code that will have to modified.

Yes , this backs up what the developer is saying - and complaining to me about us not getting the URL's right at the start of the build.

[wilderness]

FWIW, the actual WP web pages are html and may be edited with any html-text-editor, and are easily modified

The PHP-MySQL files are an entirely different story.