Permalinks structure for community

[deight]

Hello everyone,

I am very confused and lost. Hopefully someone might be able to help.

This is what I am trying to do: I want to create a community where every user will be able to post a blog post/response to a blog post after registration. I also want users to have an option to have their own diary (blog) and a user page on the website.

I want to set up a category on my website called community and add sub-categories to it:
community/cat1
community/cat2
community/cat3,
etc

User has to pick one of the categories for their post.

For the users diary I want to set category called users: something like
user/username/
where their blog is displayed.

I also need to have static pages on the website (%postname%).

I have installed WPMS, but I am not satisfied with it’s current permalink structure. I know how to change it in Network Admin, the question is what do I need to change it to?

I am familiar with WordPress, but I have no experience with WPMS. I don’t quite understand what it’s capable of and how to set it up to do what I need to do. I am sure there has to be a way.

I have also heard about BuddyPress. I wonder if it would be a better choice for me. BuddyPress is just a plug-in though. I doubt it would help me with permalinks. I am very confused.

Please point me in the right direction and let me know if there might be any resources online available to help my dream site come true.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

WordPress MultiSite is for running multiple separate blogs on one WP install (i.e. a Network). Look at WordPress.com for an example of how it normally works.

You would probably be better off with a SingleSite install and BuddyPress, as you don’t sound like you need separate sites.

[deight]

Ipstenu, Thank you for your advice. I’ll reinstall my WordPress to SingleSite.

Are you talking about the BuddyPress plug-in or BuddyPress CMS?

Is it true that I can enable BuddyPress in WordPress 3.2.1 through config.php?

[deight]

Oh, and another question is whether BuddyPress would let me set permalinks the way I described?

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

The new version should 🙂 You get a lot of power over permalinks.

[deight]

The new version of WordPress?

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

BuddyPress 🙂 1.3 has the option to massively customize URLs easily.

[@mercime]

BP 1.5.1 http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/buddypress/

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Er I totally meant 1.5 – Damn it, JJJ, you had to re-number the bloody thing!

[@mercime]

🙂

[deight]

Thank you for your responses. BuddyPress is definitely what I was looking for and it perfectly serves my needs.

I found out how to remove the word /category from my slugs – with the help of WP No Category Base Plug-in. I am not sure whether it would create any issues for indexing pages (I assume I’d be able to fix it through robots.txt)

Is there any resource online where I can find more information on massively customizing URLs in BuddyPress. I am sure others might find it helpful. I’ll post more information when I find it.

PS WordPress community rocks! Thanks everyone for your help.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I would NOT remove category from slugs. Using BP, you don’t actually have the category slug in there for your ‘groups’ anyway, so it’s not a problem.

[deight]

Why is it bad to remove category from the slug? Because it might cause conflicts with the main site?

I guess I haven’t completely set up my mind on which I will be using between categories or groups. I like the way posts are displayed in the categories. And i like that users can comment on the posts. In the groups section, the text goes in the same discussion thread, displaying the most current opinion first, then the topic of the conversation gets lost at the bottom. I wonder if I could switch the way the comments are displayed in groups (I’d probably would have to edit BuddyPress php files, right?)

Is there a way to add a “sticky” message on top of a groups page, so that the members always know what the group is about? I know there is groups description on the page where all the groups are listed, but once you are in a group, there is no information about the group.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

It’s … well it’s bad for recursive lookups when parsing URLs.

Using category in permalinks is a bad idea to begin with: http://ottopress.com/2010/category-in-permalinks-considered-harmful/

Removing it makes it worse in my experience, slows things down.