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1. rcwatson
   Member
   Posted 8 months ago #

   I have a site that is a subdirectory multisite. I have:

   http://www.example.com (root site)
   |_ http://www.example.com/research (sub site home)

   The relationship of the sub site's pages is thus:

   Home
     Whitepapers
     FAQs
        Topic A
          Subtopic 1

   When I don't organize the sub site's pages in a parent/child hierarchy, I get nice, clean, "speakable" URLs like this:

   http://www.example.com/research/
   http://www.example.com/research/whitepapers
   http://www.example.com/research/faqs
   http://www.example.com/research/topic-a
   http://www.example.com/research/subtopic-1

   I like this, even when it doesn't reflect the exact hierarchy of the site, because if someone is giving a URL verbally, say, over the phone, they can manage it.

   When I organize the pages in parent/child hierarchy, for ease of organization on the back-end for nontechnical admins, I end up with an ungainly URL scheme, like this:

   http://www.example.com/research/
   http://www.example.com/research/whitepapers
   http://www.example.com/research/faqs
   http://www.example.com/research/faqs/topic-a
   http://www.example.com/research/faqs/topic-a/subtopic-1

   Yes, I do realize it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing here. However, for the "human" aspect of this site, it's going to be impossible for sales or other folks to rattle this off over the phone, and content admins are going to freak if things aren't in a proper hierarchy.

   Is there a way to have parent/child hierarchy on the back-end, yet still display a flat URL scheme on the front-end? I've tried the Custom Permalinks plugin that everyone mentions in the other threads, but a) it doesn't work for me and b) I believe there is a setting...somewhere...in the Dashboard to make it do what I'm wanting.

2. fas.khan
   Member
   Posted 3 weeks ago #

   were you able to find a solution for this ?

3. rcwatson
   Member
   Posted 3 weeks ago #

   Nope. Wish I had. Any ideas? This issue is 8 months old, so I'd imagine a plugin was written by someone somewhere.

4. rcwatson
   Member
   Posted 3 weeks ago #

   I did a bit of digging around and found a plugin that seems to have been created, right around the time I posted this or after, to solve this problem.

   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-editor/screenshots/

   I'll give it a shot on my dev server and update you here.

5. rcwatson
   Member
   Posted 3 weeks ago #

   Ok, this permalink editor plugin seems to do what is desired here, with one quirk...a redirect is involved vs. just leaving the URL as typed.

   I can create a page such as http://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal and make it a child of the press-room page. Like this:

   Press Room
   -- Wall Street Journal

   That is what nontechnical admins will want to see when browsing the All Pages listing in WordPress.

   Then, in the wall-street-journal page, I can click the "Customise" button in the editor (under the page title) to "shorten" that to http://example.com/wall-street-journal.

   When a user visits http://example.com/wall-street-journal, it redirects to http://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

   That at least solves the problem of how to make an easy-to-speak URL while maintaining a proper parent/child hierarchy. But the drawback is that you're redirecting, which may be jarring or unwelcome to some users.

   What kind of redirect (301?) it's doing is not clear until I dig into the code more. That's important for SEO.

   Looking at it this way, I guess my other solution, which I've been using for vanity URL management for some time now works just as well.

   For that, I installed the plugin named "Redirection", which has let me set up case-sensitive vanity URLs such as http://example.com/forWSJ and http://example.com/forwsj and whatever other variants I need to have point to http://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

   It can do double duty for simulating a "flattened hierarchy" scheme on the front end in that I can leave my All Pages hierarchy undisturbed and set up a redirect (with a choice of http codes). So, a salesperson knows to say http://example.com/wall-street-journal which will redirect to http://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

   You'll have to decide whether your audiences will find it jarring that a redirect occurs upon entering the vanity URL.

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