[nateonawalk]

Hey all, an update —

Sooo this project turned into something much larger than anticipated. What seemed like a quick PHP permutation turned into a massive 100 hours+ job that is still ongoing. We’ve effectively created a complete out-of-the-box pretty permalinks solution that even folks with pre-existing bbPress forums will be able to safely turn on and use. We’ve thrown out the previous fork and are re-writing everything with our own code from scratch.

That said, the opportunity cost I’ve incurred is quite large and we’re still a couple weeks off from completing things. Every time we do a re-write, a bunch of new broken use-cases emerge. We’ve gotten offers from a couple plugin development companies to buy the plugin from us as well — so we’re trying to decide what best to do with the resources that we have.

Just want everyone to be aware of progress!

Thanks~

[nateonawalk]

Hello bbPress community,

I’ve forked @siparker ‘s plugin and have worked with a dev to develop an edited version

the new version:

– only includes post IDs at the end of topics
– moves the topic IDs to the end of the URL for URL prettiness
– makes it so that every page only has one path (important to prevent negative SEO duplicate content vulnerabilities)
– works with breadcrumbs and edit post links too

I’m doing a final debugging right now, but I’ll publish the code on GitHub once it’s polished and then will share a ZIP here.

@netweb, would love to help work toward getting this implemented in core functionality 🙂

[nateonawalk]

I replied too! Would love to hear others’ opinions too 🙂 @siparker @netweb.

[nateonawalk]

Had a chance to test this out locally. The URL re-writes work like a charm, without any conflicts.

@siparker @netweb The plugin works almost perfectly, BUT there is still one big issue — by adding -postIDs to the end of Forum and Category URLs (mysite.com/forums/category-name-postIDstring) or (mysite.com/forums/category-name/forum-name-postIDstring), we’ve defeated the SEO purpose of re-writing these URLs.

For authority to be passed allll the way down to the topics, we need for the forums and categories’ permalinks to live without these -postIDs. That way, (mysite.com/forums/category-name/forum-name/topic-name-postIDstring) can get the full trickle down benefit from any links /category-name/ and /forum-name/ receive.

I’m going to play around with the plugin code to see if I can just rip the right bit out! Thanks again!

EDIT: So removing .'-f' .$post->ID from lines 50 and 60 fixed the URLs in the CMS BUT broke the page. It seems like the plugin relies on the postIDs to associate the new URLs with the old URL structure? If so, how can we achieve this without actually using the postID in the URL?

[nateonawalk]

@siparker you are a godsend! I’ll have to test this tonight, but I’m hoping to be one of the first new bbPress forums to proudly be using pretty, SEO-friendly permalinks. Thank you!!