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

[mark waterous]

> From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-
> bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Hikari
> Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2010 6:22 PM
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
>
> There shouldn't even need a reason, we should be able to use anything
> we want. Even if it's ugly or bad for SEO.

I think that's what everybody is missing. You can. Just because WordPress
doesn't dumb it down and make it a one-click-fix doesn't mean you can't.

And yes, there should be a reason. There's no reason why my car shouldn't
turn on when I'm approaching, stop on its own if somebody is crossing the
road, and massage my feet on long drives, but it doesn't. 


> The site is mine and I wanna structure it as I want. We shouldn't be
> forced to use a useless (for us) string just to solve somebody
> else needs. Wordpress shouldn't limit our possibilities. Period :P

Custom taxonomies should work like namespaces. If you have three taxonomies,
such as 'Post', 'Category', and 'Links', these are by definition three
separate entities. Under any of these you should be able to repeatedly use a
single slug (since each should act as its own namespace), such as
'custom-entry'.

Now you have three urls;

http://yoursite.com/post/custom-entry
http://yoursite.com/category/custom-entry
http://yoursite.com/link/custom-entry

These are easily readable, no they're not 10 characters long, but who cares.
They also readily define what you're looking at. The first is a post, the
second is a category, the third is a link.

Now we remove these. Your url is http://yoursite.com/custom-entry which
makes a couple people happier. How does WordPress tell whether you were
looking for the post custom-entry, or the category, or the link, or any
number of possible custom taxonomies? I guess what we should be really
arguing here is the fact that WordPress doesn't have psychic abilities in
the core.

The fact of the matter is right now you have to use a unique slug,
independent of what taxonomy the object belongs to. This doesn't mean we
should further break the system by adding unnecessary functionality.

WordPress shouldn't have to build control panels for every possible
scenario, it's just not probable or intelligent, not when you can accomplish
this on your own. The documentation on how to do it can be found here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html (that url broken down
is documentation -> v1.3 -> modules -> mod_rewrite, but I suppose they could
lose the unnecessary /docs/ :D ), or here:
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/lighttpd/docs:modrewrite, or here:
http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpRewriteModule