[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #32639: A URL Agnostic Wordpress

[WordPress Trac]

#32639: A URL Agnostic Wordpress
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 Reporter:  mattfiocca   |      Owner:
     Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |  Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  General      |    Version:  trunk
 Severity:  normal       |   Keywords:
  Focuses:               |
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 My apologies if this has been discussed before. I've tried digging, but
 couldn't find a discussion about this.

 I'm curious why Wordpress has to store the domain (site_url) in the
 database, and why absolute URLs are used and stored in the DB? It just
 makes migrations really messy for large DBs, from one domain to another.
 Plus, in spirit of Wordpress being stateless, wouldn't it be nice just to
 be able to pick up and move a site from one server to another, on another
 domain without requiring some regex db scrapping migration plugin?

 To me, the database should only care about things specific to the
 Wordpress blog content itself, and I think that link/url building should
 be happening at runtime within the application. Purely my opinion.

 I imagine this could be accomplished by using the request headers to
 determine what domain your on when using functions like `site_url()`. For
 sites that are not rooted at /, but at locations like /blog, we could
 leverage the config file for a constant like `define('BLOG_ROOT','/blog')`
 or something along those lines, that could be appended to the domain found
 in the request, and together prepended to the relative resource url at
 runtime. I would vote to keep the `WP_HOME` and `WP_SITEURL` constants, so
 that if they are present, those values are used instead. But, why store
 that stuff in the DB when links can be built at runtime? It would also cut
 down on DB queries.

 A use case for this would be at the PaaS level, where a hosting provider
 could offer managed Wordpress hosting. when a client spins up a new
 Wordpress site, the provider could put that site at a temporary domain
 like clientid.hosting.com. As the customer builds their site, nothing
 about that temporary domain is being saved in the DB. Once the customer
 finally obtains their own domain name, and points to their account with
 the hosting provider, absolutely nothing should have to change in the
 customer's database, and the hosting provider shouldn't have to mangle the
 customer's config file on the server. The site should just be allowed to
 behave like an application that is listening for requests, and serving
 content, regardless of domain.

 Like I said, this might have been discussed at length before, and there
 might be pitfalls that i'm just not recognizing, I just wanted to submit
 this request to the community to see what kind of discussion this would
 produce.

 Thanks all. Go easy on me if this was a dumb idea to present :)

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32639>
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