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

[Otto]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org> wrote:
> True, technically. But can you honestly say that you've never tried
> traversing up through a deep-linked URL structure in order to reach a more
> general page?

Yes, back in the day when URLs bore a 1-1 relationship to the
underlying filesystem, that was a good and useful thing to do. But the
truth is that I haven't done that in years. Short of going up to the
very root of a site to get to the home page, anyway.

URL hacking is basically dead as a legitimate practice. Nobody but us
power users can do it. Normal people *can't* do it. And I'm going to
design my systems to be used by everybody, not the technologically
literate.

You and I might think nothing of editing a URL. My mom would regard it
as black magic. And my mom should be able to use any site on the
network.

> And while I don't disagree with your "who cares, because it's not
> technically a valid URL?" position, I do think that it would be nice to be
> able to map those empty URLs. At the very least, we should be able to have a
> theme template that gives an appropriate archive listing for the taxonomy in
> question.

Pages handle this edge case just fine. If you want to make a Category
page and make a template and stick wp_list_categories in it, nothing
is stopping you that I'm aware of.

Making the code have a general case for a page that nobody can see
because nothing links to it seems a bit silly to me.

Now, if you want to generalize the whole taxonomy structure into the
general case and include this sort of thing, great. I'm all for that.
There's stuff with custom post types and taxonomies in 3.0 that this
sort of notion would fit nicely into, I think. Perhaps some standard
handling for the rewrites on custom post types would be quite
appropriate.

> Sorry, I got a little philosophical there. But what I'm trying to say is
> that just because this particular issue isn't *technically* a bug, there's
> no reason why we shouldn't make it work better and to our advantage.

There's nothing wrong with improvement, nor would I argue otherwise.
However, there is something wrong with breaking things that aren't
broken just for the sake of change. Any "routing" enhancements must
preserve the existing routing system at all costs. Changing my
permalinks just because somebody wants change is absolutely not
acceptable from any standpoint. And discussing a new rewriting
mechanism treads dangerously close to that line. Improving the
existing system, or adding onto it, does not.

-Otto