Permalink Structure,Re-write Rules and WP Pages

Part 2. – I understand what you’re saying, if a user were to create a WP ‘page’ called cats and a ‘category’ called cats, things would bork without the /category (or whatever you put in the category field) part. I suppose that in part I’m assuming that folks using pretty permalinks like that would have enough sense not to create a ‘page’ and a ‘category’ with the same names/slugs. Personally (and for a couple of clients) I’d like to drop the /whatever part, and work within the guidelines that a category can’t be named the same thing as a page/slug. No matter what you put in the field (or if you leave it blank and get /category) it just ends up being extra un-needed cruft in the URL in most cases. I can see making a case for using the word “tags” in place of /category since tags are currently somewhat of an “in” kind of thing, but in the long run, it’s just extra fluff.

While I understand why it’s written (WP Core) that way, I don’t see a meaningful use for that ‘chunk’ of the URL (other than as you mentioned avoiding crashes with other pages/permalinks, which if that’s the only reason it’s there, it’s a pretty poor design), I could see using something like %authorname% on a blog with many authors, or something like that, which at least makes a little bit of sense, but just sticking some extra ‘stuff’ in the URL to compensate for users that would ‘do’ without thinking, and end up creating the naming conflict you’ve mentioned doesn’t seem practical.

The same ‘clash’ or ‘crash’ situation exists even with /category or /whatever you put in the box anyway — suppose a user puts ‘cats’ or ‘bob’ in the category field, then an actual category called “spots”, you run into the same crash/clash if a user creates a page called “bob” and a sub-page called “spots”, or a page called “category” and sub-page called “spots”. So why not have the ability to just eliminate the cruft ?

….off to the sandbox….

I raised a similar issue on the hackers list a couple of weeks ago, and the discussion pretty much degraded into a number of .htaccess hack solutions for part one, but I don’t think we really got into the /category thing. I’ve done a bunch of searching, etc, and haven’t been able to come up with anything solid (short of hacking around in core) to get rid of it though.

At the moment, I have enough folks (granted they’re mostly seo paranoids, and have some kind of religious fanaticism about URL depth) asking me to rid them of the /category part, I’m going to have to do something about it.