Preserving WordPress permalinks in Nikola

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Last month I moved from having a dynamic WordPress blog to having a statically built blog generated by Nikola. I wanted to preserve the WordPress-style post and RSS URLs when I migrated and while I could have manually created redirections within Nikola, I thought I could do better through web server directives.

My WordPress installation generated posts URLs in the form http://wordspeak.org/yyyy/mm/dd/some_post_name. After using the WordPress importer in Nikola, that post now exists at http://wordspeak.org/posts/yyyymmddsome_post_name.html. I noticed that Apache RewriteRules didn’t play nicely with the relative paths that Nikola generates but I found I could achieve what I wanted with the Redirect family of directives.

Here’s a snippet of my Apache .htaccess file to handle these redirections.

RedirectMatch permanent ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/([a-z][-a-z0-9]*)$ /posts/$1$2$3$4.html
# /feed /feed/ /feed/rss /feed?=http://wordspeak.org
RedirectMatch permanent ^/feed /rss.xml
RedirectPermanent /rss /rss.xml

Hopefully someone will find this valuable.