I recently re-launched a site of mine, breastfeedingfordads.com, which I migrated from Wordpress to Drupal. It took a bit of work to get the basics the way I wanted, and replicate the functionality of the plugins I was using, but it seems to work well.

There was a bit of a problem, however. Out of the box, all of the old articles that were converted to the "blog" content type (as created using the converter mentioned before) had the arcane default URL structure of "content/[title-raw]". An obvious problem was that this didn't match the Wordpress default nor my custom format of "[yyyy]/[mm]/[title-raw]". This was leaving me with lots of unnecessary 404 errors and disgruntled visitors, so it needed to be fixed.

Here's how I fixed it:

First off I had to update the existing settings so that Global Redirect wouldn't keep re-building the wrong ones..

• I went to the "Automated Alias Settings" page (Site Building -> URL Aliases -> Automated Alias Settings).
• Under the "General Settings" section I removed everything from the "Strings to Remove" text box so all words would be retained.
• Under the "General Settings" section I also enabled the "Reduce strings to letters and numbers from ASCII-96"
• Under the "Node Path Settings" section I updated "Blog entry paths" to "[yyyy]/[mm]/[title-raw]".
• Under the
• After that I hit "Save Configuration".

Next off I had to purge the old aliases:

• I went to the "Delete Aliases" page (Site Building -> URL Aliases -> Delete Aliases).
• Once there I selected "content" and clicked "Delete Aliases Now".
• After a moment all of the page aliases had been removed.

Lastly, I wanted to create the correct aliases ahead of time - I could have left it Global Redirect to do, but best to take care of this now:

• Again, back to the "Automated Alias Settings" page.
• Under the "Node Path Settings" section I opened the "Replacement Patterns" section and clicked on "Bulk generate aliases".
• I think clicked "Save Configuration" to have all of the URLs updated, and because there were more than 50 nodes to update I had to run it twice.

Note that the last step could have been done in one step by updating the "Maximum number f objects to alias in a bulk operation" to a higher number, but on very large sites you should be careful to not set it too high or the page will time out.

Anyway, after a few quick moments all of the old URLs were no longer generating 404 errors.