I know, I know, the request for relative URLs in WordPress has been made many times and then knocked back every time by the WP devs, but bear with me.<\/p>\n
What I’m asking for isn’t the removal of absolute URLs from the HTML generated by WordPress – this is the “defence” used by WP devs each time. Absolute URLs can still be output, but have them constructed by the use of $_SERVER variables that PHP provides.<\/p>\n
What I want changed is that the *database* only stores relative URLs when referring to content on the site. Even the top-level URL doesn’t need to be stored (again, $_SERVER variables can be used) – nothing in the WP DB needs to ever mention an absolute URL for content on the site itself.<\/p>\n
If it was easy to substitute absolute URLs in the database when say going from dev -> UAT -> live, then it wouldn’t be such an issue, but you can’t simply mysqldum\/sed\/mysql for such a move because serialised data prevents it. Instead, I have to tediously use a special third-party tool such as:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/interconnectit.com\/products\/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases\/<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t it be great if I never had to do any search\/replace (sed or the tool above) at all though to move the WP DB to another URL? It’s by far the most frustrating thing during develoment at the moment (or even if you’re just converting a site from http to https) and I can’t believe WP devs just keep ignoring this request over the space of many years.<\/p>\n
Remember – absolute URLs will remain in the HTML (constructed from $_SERVER variables plus a relative URL from the DB) output by WordPress, which negates the only reason WP devs refuse to implement this. It’s the *database* that will change to using relative URLs, not the HTML that’s output.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-6843040","topic","type-topic","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic\/6843040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/topic"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic\/6843040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6843040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}