@Lynq:
In the example you came up with, you seem to have come up with your own structure. As far as I can tell, Bbpress’ structure is Forums > Topics > Posts.
So the current hierarchy eliminates the possibility of the duplicate URL in your example. If you had a forum “General Chat” and two separate topics called “chat” they’d have to be in separate forums.
EXAMPLE:
Preferred:
http://www.domain.com/general-chat/topic-one/chat
http://www.domain.com/general-chat/topic-two/chat
Current:
1. http://www.domain.com/forums
changes to
2. http://www.domain.com/forums/forum/general-chat/
when you click a forum, and then changes to
3. http://www.domain.com/forums/topic/topic-one
@Mr Jacoby:
I appreciate your response, and I’ve seen some very helpful posts by you in these forums. Thanks. In this instance, however, are missing our point. In my example above, you can see that the URLs look nothing like wordpress permalinks. End users (and our visitors) are not concerned with how the back end might be similar. We only see that the URLs look silly and lack continuity (specifically switching from forums to forum to topic). They do not reflect the simple forum > topic > post hierarchy. When I said ‘useless,’ I was, of course, speaking in terms of end users and our visitors. I get that bbpress developers use it. I also get that it’d be possible to change (especially since wordpress is already doing what we want).
If wordpress URLs looked like bbpress URLs, I suspect they’d look something like:
http://www.domain.com/pages/page/page-one OR
http://www.domain.com/posts/post/post-one OR
http://www.domain.com/page/page-one
My guess is that this isn’t something that’s going to be possible with bbpress’ plugin unless someone develops it on the side (as you suggested), but please try to at least understand our inquiry instead of pretending like we simply don’t know what we’re talking about.
If anyone has any helpful hints on where one might get started on changing the url structure, it would be greatly appreciated. I see this being an issue that many, many more wordpress users will seek a solution for.
For SEO, and for advertising purposes, it’s much better to remove unnecessary /word/words/more-words-that-dont-help-identify-page-content/ from URLs.
