[wp-hackers] Some Thoughts/Enhancement Ideas In And AroundTheCategory Side Of Things

[Mike Schinkel]

On Feb 10, 2010, at 10:26 PM, Michael Pretty wrote:
> That said, I do think something could be thought of to improve the issue with site.com/category/ throwing a 404 by default.  Personally, I've always setup a page a /category/ that used a custom template that listed the categories to fill this spot.  No reason something can't be added to core to do the same.  Themes would have to support it though.


Strongly agree.

On Feb 10, 2010, at 9:28 PM, michael at mfields.org wrote:
> It would be great if WordPress could actually put the place holders for
> taxonomies to use. If I were to set up a custom taxonomy on my site called
> "fish" and under fish I had the following terms defined: "guppy", "trout"
> and "shark" I could easily view a collection of posts that are associated
> with each term via these permalinks:
> 
> /fish/guppy/
> /fish/trout/
> /fish/shark/
> 
> However, what if I wanted to link to a collection of posts that showed all
> "fish"? You would think that you could be able to go to: /fish/ to
> accomplish this, but instead you are greeted with a 404 page.
> 
> I realize that adding the taxonomy slug to the url is how WordPress deals
> with rewrites changing /?fish=guppy to /fish/guppy/ which may require
> another query var to execute. Perhaps /?taxonomy=fish?
> 
> I think that this would be a great addition to core especially when use of
> custom taxonomies becomes more widespread.

Also strongly agree.

I wonder if WordPress's approach to routing URLs isn't finally being exposed as unable to scale in functionality without gross increase in complexity and/or reduction of performance?  If would seem a much better approach could be devised that would be backward compatible with old plugins but also performant and much less complex.

I've worked on URL routing system in the past that split URL paths on slashes and then traversed a tree of rules to determine how to route. That worked extremely well and could be layered on top of the variable assignment that WordPress uses behind the scenes.

JMTCW as improved URL routing is in my top 3 requests for improvement in WordPress.

-Mike