One of our clients accidentally used a preview link when publicizing a post in a mass email. Of course, the readers of this email could not resolve a link to a preview of a post on the client’s WordPress site. Since this link went out by email, there was no opportunity to correct the mistake on that end. We wanted to create a redirect from the preview link to the actual page using Nginx.
We created a file called custom-redirects.conf in their site’s server directory. In this case that was at /etc/nginx/sites-available/ediblecleveland.com/server/custom-redirects.conf. In that file we added:
if ( $query_string = "preview_id=15781&preview_nonce=4538cdad70&_thumbnail_id=15792&preview=true" ) {
return 301 /archives/15781;
}This simply looks for the very specific query string that was accidentally used in the email and, if found, returns the plain post instead.
After making this change we used sudo nginx -s reload to reload the configuration with syntax checking, so we didn’t accidentally bring Nginx down with a syntax error.