For those of you who have been running version 3.0.5.2 or earlier of ClassiPress and have been holding off on upgrading because you didn’t want to have a bunch of broken inbound links, this plugin is for you.

History

Before custom post types were introduced in WordPress 3.0, ClassiPress had to get creative with how to separate ads from blog posts. This was essentially done by putting all blog posts and blog categories into a nested “blog” category. We then filtered out that category from the rest of the site where the ads lived. It was certainly a hack but the only ‘real’ way to accomplish what we wanted to do.

When custom post types eventually came out, we were ecstatic and rebuilt ClassiPress to take full advantage of them. We rolled out version 3.0.5.3 with CPTs and haven’t looked back since.

Custom Post Type Adoption

Most of our customers were happy to see that we were quick to adopt the latest and greatest features in WordPress, however some had concerns. The biggest issue was how using custom post types changes the ad urls which is not only going to break inbound links from other sites, but will also make your site lose it’s “link juice”.

Some of those customers decided not to upgrade and are now missing out on all the latest and greatest features in ClassiPress 3.1+. The good news is you can now upgrade and use this plugin to automatically redirect your old ad urls to your new ones.

Example

Don’t quite understand what we mean? Check this out.

Say your ClassiPress site had an ad with this url:

http://www.mysite.com/my-ad/

If you upgrade to ClassiPress 3.0.5.3 or greater, your new ad url would be:

http://www.mysite.com/ads/my-ad/

Normally that would break all your old ad urls (unless you put together some fancy rewrite rules). Now with this plugin, it will automatically do a 301-redirect for each of your ads. Your site could have ten or ten thousand ads and it really wouldn’t make a difference.

Download Plugin

Go ahead and download the free ClassiPress Redirect plugin (customers must be logged in) and give it a shot. You’ll have to upgrade to 3.0.5.4 or higher to see it work of course.

If you have yet to upgrade from 3.0.5.3 you should download 3.1 (or whatever the latest version is) instead of upgrading one version at a time. Also make sure to backup your site before performing the upgrade just in case you need to roll back.