Is it possible to get the permalinks of wordpress to display as .html rather than as the post name without any extension, i have an old site i need to migrate to wp and i do not want to lose any backlinks. i have tried to set this (using %postname%.html) but it refuses to work any ideas, thanks in advance
Yes, you can. For example, your post title is: "I am testing", and you want URL: "i-am-testing.html" you can use following permalink structure: %postname%.html
Only one mistake here. You must put it /%postname%.html (see the "/" is critical ) or /%postname%.htm you may also choose /%category%/%postname%.html which shows category name as well.
I agree with above answers, its best to read the wordpress guide of using permalinks. However you might consider, the backlinks that you have built, because i have changed permalinks after a few months blogging, and it needed to be redirected, and need lots of times for Google to re-index your new permalinks. Good luck.
hey guys thanks for help on this I will try to catch some with a redirect, clearly i Need to take this slowly ----- update, just tried the new permalink structure and it worked on posts and found a plugin for pages to add the html extension http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-on-pages/ hope this info helps others..... Cheers