[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress Trac] #6286: Directories filtered by member roles

[buddypress-trac]

#6286: Directories filtered by member roles
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 Reporter:  sooskriszta   |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  API           |     Version:
 Severity:  normal        |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                |
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Comment (by boonebgorges):

 > What sort of problems?
 > Problems such as /foo/username/ and /members/username/ wanting to point
 to the same user? Problems such as BuddyPress deciding to make Roles-Users
 a many-to-many relationship at some point?

 Yes, these are some issues. As you note, members can have more than one
 member type. Having the same content available at multiple URLs is not
 good practice, for SEO and for other reasons. So if user 'boone' had
 member types 'foo' and 'bar', you would want `/foo/boone/` to resolve to
 `/bar/boone/`, or the other way around. But which? And what do you do when
 a user changes user type? Do you redirect or show 404s? If you redirect,
 you'll need a system for storing former member type associations. If, as
 you suggest, the canonical URL will be something member-type-agnostic -
 like `/members/boone/` - then it seems like quite a bit of work to build
 the necessary system for routing, just to resolve to the URLs we've
 already got. So I'm going to suggest we do nothing with single user URLs
 for the moment.

 There are further potential issues with top-level directory URLs. The top-
 level page `/members/` is currently handled by a WP page. To change that
 slug, you edit the page. Presumably we would not want to do this in the
 case of member types. But now we've introduced an asymmetry in the way
 top-level pages are managed by admins. In addition, we will have to cast a
 fairly broad net with regard to slug conflicts. Eg, if someone has a
 member type 'foo', what do we do if they also have a page 'foo', or a post
 called 'foo' with permalink structure `/%pagename%/`? These problems can
 be solved, of course, but I don't want to put in the work if people
 generally think that `/members/foo/` is a better URL format. I would have
 to think about it a bit more to decide what I think is the best general
 solution.

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Ticket URL: <https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6286#comment:5>
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