remove folder from URL and add .html

What do your Permalink settings look like?

/%year%%monthnum%%day%/%postname%

But this is strictly for pages, not posts. To be honest, we rarely have clients who use WordPress for blogging, and unless I’m mistaken, the permalink structure cannot be extended to exert control over pages (unless there’s some sort of plug-in that does this?).

You’re correct, page URLs start from the WordPress Address. Is your WordPress install located in a subfolder of the domain?

No, the install is in the root.

When we create pages, we are creating then as parent/child pages.

WHAT WE HAVE NOW:
Home
Section 1 = /Section-1
— Page 1.1 = /Section-1/Page-1-1
— Page 1.2 = /Section-1/Page-1-2
Section 2 = /Section-2
— Page 2.1 = /Section-2/Page-2-1
— Page 2.2 = /Section-2/Page-2-2

WHERE WE NEED TO END UP
Home
Section 1 = /Section-1.html
— Page 1.1 = /Page-1-1.html
— Page 1.2 = /Page-1-2.html
Section 2 = /Section-2.html
— Page 2.1 = /Page-2-1.html
— Page 2.2 = /Page-2-2.html

Removing the parent/child relationship between pages and using theme menus is not an option. There is too much automation in play here (sectional menus showing up based on parent/child, site map page, etc.). All we need is to write out the top-level folder. Just yank it out!

And then add .html at the end. I know – it sounds silly, but it’s important in this specific project.

WordPress does a great job of being an open platform that is easy to program around. So why is this so hard? ??

I’ve exhausted my searched through plug-ins, and I’ve tried countless rules through htaccess (which either fail to run or break the page) and add_rewrite_rule(), which have no effect on the page.

If this is a difficult or complex bit of programming work to accomplish, I’d love to learn and would appreciate it someone could give me a head start on it. If this is simple, I’d love it if someone could help me construct this, and then I can deconstruct how it operates working off an existing sample.

But I can’t be asking the impossible…am I?

Does the end result URL absolutely have to look like you’re describing, or do you simply need links to follow your prescribed format? The reason I ask is that when WordPress receives a request for a page, it looks at the slug of each page to match to the URL, so that you can actually just include the slug after the domain and you’ll be served the proper page regardless of parent/child relationship.

For example, on my site my Content License page is a child of my About page, so the URL is https://christiaanconover.com/about/license. However, entering https://christiaanconover.com/license still gets you to the page.

If you simply need clean URLs to share, WordPress already supports that usage model. If you have to have the URL show the page slug relative to the root domain regardless of hierarchy, then you’re going to need to do some custom coding (assuming there isn’t a plugin out there that will do that), because you’re talking about modifying a core function of WordPress. WordPress is highly customizable, but that means code is required.

I’d recommend you spend some time reading up on the Rewrite API if you’re able to write a plugin to achieve your desired result, as that will tell you whether what you’re looking to accomplish is possible.

Hi Christian,

Thank you for the response. Unfortunately, the ending URL MUST be in the format described above. I’ll look into the API in more detail. I’m a decent programmer, but I will probably need to assign this to one of my guys who can soak it in more easily than I can.

Thanks!

No problem. I’m sure you’ve already done this but check to see whether any existing plugins address this. Good luck, and let us know if you get it sorted out.

Additionally, if you need assistance with the coding, you may want to try the Hacks forum.