How to create short urls for sharing and downloadable content?

Here’s a possibly simple solution, using an ancillary table, and user-defined short slugs:

create a post_meta “short_slug” when creating a post, the link-name from your example

on save_post,
if (meta_key=’short_slug’ and is_a_valid(meta_value))
wpdb->insert into short_slugs_table slug,permalink ,

your index.php on your mgscr.com could then open a mysql connection to the same db, parse the url and do a Location:redirect.