Bierner: Tried the “Custom Permalinks” plugin but it doesn’t seem to work

Lokan: What’s the actual goal?

Pruett: And I don’t fancy handwriting a lot of these URLs

Wittwer: Matching to previous site structure

Schenker: Handwriting in .htaccess*

Lokan: What prevents you from constructing the site as you wish from the start?

Godsey: SEO reasons apparently

Lokan: That doesn’t make any sense

Eovaldi: As far as I can tell, they want everything pixel perfect and URL matches

Lokan: I’m not following why you can’t just do that from the start

Trygg: The site has a main menu got this okay with WP’s menus

Sydnes: Then on one page it has a sub menu. That submenu changes depending on the page

Bateson: I had thought about doing it as submenus but that would require registering a menu each time – too much effort

Schwaner: I’ve rejigged it to work on hierarchy

Alphin: So if it has siblings, they should be shown on this “sub menu”

Dangel: And if the page has children, display them in the ever-so-creatively named “sub-sub-menu”

Rizzo: That’s fine and working

Asbridge: But on my redevelop site, it has a permalink of site.com/about/the-company. The old URL was site.com/the-company/the-company-2 for some bizarre reason

Boucouvalas: My parent page is About, a sub page here is the-company

Lutjen: Renaming the parent page isn’t an option since the next sibling to “the-company” apparently needs to have the URL site.com/what-we-do

Sao: Hence looking for an override plugin

Lokan: This is correct — site.com/about/the-company . this is not — site.com/the-company/the-company-2 . and goes against “seo”

Lokan: I can’t help if you’re dead set on doing things incorrectly.

Lokan: I personally would tell them it’s time to correct it if you’re going to the trouble of rebuilding it all

Reiner: Here’s a story then opsec – this company have only just got round to using source control.

Lokan: Otherwise i just wouldn’t work on it.

Lokan: It’s sloppy, not my style ;

Algier: 7 years of god knows what dev, where doing. no idea to any site

Komar: Trying to correct it. Getting somewhere but it’s taking time.

Mrazek: They’re getting it the right way

Lokan: I’d say “there’s a few url’s i’ll need to correct on the site and in your webmaster tools account”

Smethers: I’m going to end up messing about for ages. I’ll 301 the old URLs to something far less stupid

Lokan: You can tell google “we changed a to b so it’s more reasonable” and tell them to recrawl the site

Blanchfield: Yeah, that sounds way better

Lokan: You’ll have to do that anyway eventually. if you change any url you’ll need to 301

Riche: If they don’t like it – tough.

Lokan: It’s easy to initiate a recrawl

Eshelman: Haha. With this company a 301 for old links is like fairy dust.

Hirkaler: They didn’t know it could be done

Lokan: I’ve been there, trust me

Lokan: What you need is something that also captures the 404’s so you’re not making 301’s for urls no one is ever hitting

Lokan: WordPress will try to guess if it’s close enough, but that’s not anything to rely on

Lokan: I’ve had a few lawyers with terrible messes on their sites

Lokan: Sometimes a decade of cruft and crazy urls with no seo/organisation

Rabehl: I’ve got some decent logging going on actually I manage their servers, hence why it’s been dumped on me – previous dev quote “I don’t need source control, my code is perfect”.

Heidtbrink: Weird thing is – they’re OBSESSED with SEO

Lokan: Many places are, they think it’s some sort of money fountain