Dragon Redirect Manager

A quiet pointer to the Pro add-on: an Upgrade to Pro link on the Plugins screen, a one-line note at the foot of the plugin's screens, and a single dismissible notice once the plugin has done its job. Nothing in the free plugin is locked or changed, and all three disappear when Pro is active.

Nine matching and save-path fixes: prefix rules respect segment boundaries, percent-encoded URLs and duplicate exact rules are handled correctly, and a failed save is reported as one.

What's fixed in 1.0.12

• Prefix rules match whole segments. A /news rule no longer catches /newsletter/signup, and the carried-over path is joined to the target with exactly one slash: /old -> /new/ now sends /old/page to /new/page rather than /new//page.
• Percent-encoded URLs stay as typed. A 404 for /foo%3Fx=1 used to be logged as /foo?x=1; creating a redirect from it produced a rule that matched every /foo request and never the real one, and the 404 never left the inbox. Encoded characters are now preserved end to end, /a%2Fb no longer collides with /a/b, and existing rules are re-indexed automatically on update.
• //host/path is a path. A request to //example.org/old no longer matches a rule for /old, and the 404 Monitor no longer merges it onto /old.
• Cross-site redirects to the same path are allowed. /pricing -> https://shop.example.net/pricing was refused as "Source and target resolve to the same URL". Loop detection now compares the host as well.
• One exact rule per path. Exact rules match the path without its query string, so /page?id=1 and /page?id=2 were the same rule and whichever the database returned first won. A second rule for the same path is now refused with a pointer to the existing one. Duplicates already saved are disabled during the update (the one that was actually serving is kept) and listed in an admin notice.
• A failed save is reported as a failure. If the database refuses to write a redirect, you no longer see "Redirect created", the 404 stays in the inbox, and imports count the row as skipped.
• Slug-change auto-redirects on non-slug permalinks. On Plain permalinks or structures like /%year%/%post_id%/ a rename silently attempted a self-redirect; it is now skipped cleanly, and any failed auto-redirect is logged.
• Fuzzy typo correction on subdirectory installs. On example.com/blog a typo such as /blog/abot-us was scored against /about-us including the /blog prefix and never reached the confidence threshold. Request and candidate paths are now compared in the same form.
• Schema creation is verified. The database version is only recorded once the tables are confirmed to exist, so a failed table creation is retried instead of being forgotten.

Updating re-indexes your existing rules once; no settings change.

Housekeeping release: code comments tidied and a stale coding-standards exclusion removed. No functional change.

= 1.0.11 =

• Housekeeping: code comments tidied and a stale coding-standards exclusion removed. No functional change.

Redirect hit-counting is now far lighter on busy sites: a burst of traffic to a redirect no longer means a database write on every single hit.

= 1.0.10 =

• Performance: on sites with a persistent object cache, redirect hit counts are buffered and written in batches instead of one database write per hit, so high-traffic redirects put much less load on the database. Low-traffic redirects still update promptly, and sites without an object cache behave exactly as before.

Hardening: bounds regex-rule matching against catastrophic backtracking and rate-limits 404 logging under bot traffic.

= 1.0.9 =

• Security: regex redirect rules are validated against nested-quantifier patterns and matching is bounded at runtime, so a bad pattern cannot hang requests (ReDoS).
• Reliability: 404 logging is rate-limited per IP so a bot storm cannot grow the log table without bound.

Tested and verified on WordPress 7.1.

• Compatibility: tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Deleting a redirect now asks for confirmation, and the redirect list is paginated with search so it stays fast with thousands of rules.

Your data now survives uninstall by default.

Uninstalling no longer deletes the plugin's data unless you explicitly opt in first, so removing it to debug — or coming back later — keeps everything intact. Where the plugin has a settings screen you'll find a new "Delete all data on uninstall" option; leave it off to keep your data.

Design-system polish: sharper spacing, clearer filters.

A refinement pass on the new look: better breathing room under the admin bar, clearer segmented filters, and small table fixes. Purely visual.

A cleaner, faster-to-scan interface: the new Dragon design system arrives.

Every screen now wears Dragon Core's design system. The 404 Monitor gets a denser, log-style table that fits more on screen; rule patterns and status codes are monospace for easy reading; and the header is now consistent across every Dragon plugin. Purely visual — redirects and the 404 inbox behave exactly as before.

Fuzzy typo correction is now free: confidently-matched typo'd URLs can 301 straight to the right page.

Previously a Pro feature, fuzzy typo auto-correction is now part of the free plugin — enable it under Redirects → Settings. When a visitor hits a 404 whose URL is a confident close match to one of your published posts or pages, they are redirected there instead of seeing an error. Uncertain 404s are always left to stand, and nothing is ever redirected to the homepage. If you had this enabled in Pro, your settings carry over automatically.