I am currently managing a major site restructure and have moved about 1000 articles from a range of WordPress blog installations into on central installation. As you can imagine, this is not without a few hiccips.
One extremely useful tool I have discovered is the broken-link-checker. It will examine all your links, then report on broken or redirected. You can then manually edit the links from the plugin interface (rather than edit the pages).
Not just links in posts, but in comments too. Also you can also automatically update redirected links. You can bulk update all current 301 redirects to show the correct final URL, which will take the strain off your server.
So, in theory I may soon be able to clean up all my links, and use htaccess only for ensuring that external links are sent to the right home.
There are some other interesting WordPress plugins for links too.
I was also going to look at this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/
a simple way to update links if you are resutructuring. But I have already set up the 301′s so hopefully the broken link checker will be quicker.
Have so far moved about 1000 articles in the last week. Still more to move. Everything is coming together and hopefully htaccess will not be too bloated.
