Date and name based friendly URL using .htaccess

Question

I'm planning on switching from having my blog on wordpress.com to having it on my own site hosted on my own server. Naturally I want to preserve the link structure from wordpress so that no links to my blog out there on the WWW break.

So my question is, how do I get the following friendly URL

http://example.com/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name

to map to some structure like

http://example.com/index.php?page=bla-bla

on my server using .htaccess?

Can the identifier bla-bla be a simple integer id, or does it have to include both date and name, that would be yyyy-mm-dd-post-name?

Thanks in advance.

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EDIT: Thank you for your quick replies. A few additions to my question though: I'm not currently using wordpress.org, so I don't have a control panel that can generate the file for me. At least I think not. And I'm also not going to use wordpress on my own server.

Answer 1

You can make following work as you require .. put it in a .htaccess file.

# Options +FollowSymLinks  
# RewriteEngine On  
#   
# RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d  
# RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f  
#   
# RewriteRule ^page/(\d+)*$ ./page.php?id=$1 

To read all of the details .. click here to read "friendly and pretty urls"

Answer 2

If your host is a Linux server, the rewrite will be supported out of the box. If you host is a Windows server, you will need a rewrite plugin installed.

Windows server is running Helicon Tech ISAPI_Rewrite v3, and it works perfectly fine after I:

Turned the plugin on

In Helm: Home > Domains >  domain_name > Website Extensions > URL Rewriting

Wrote my rewrite correctly

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* /blog/index.php [NC,L]
<blank line>

Changed my WordPress permalinks to custom

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Answer 3

There's a setting on the WordPress control panel that you can activate, and a .htaccess file provided with WordPress that lets it work. It lets you set up the URL's any way you want.

Answer 4

WordPress has permalinks built-in and will create an appropriate .htaccess file for you. If you're going to use WordPress on your own domain as well, that is.