• Resolved unklee

    (@unklee)


    I used to have a self-coded HTML site with a WordPress blog attached. I am in the process of converting to a fully WP site – i.e. the blog will be the same except its home page will now be the site home page, and the HTML pages will become WP pages. I have about a hundred pages and several hundred blog posts.

    To keep as many URLs the same as possible, I want to have the posts without any extension, just as is standard with WP, but have .shtml as the extension on all pages. From my reading and testing, it seems with this plugin, it is both or nothing, is that right?

    Thanks.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/add-any-extension-to-pages/

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • Plugin Author Marios Alexandrou

    (@marios-alexandrou)

    Actually on a test site I’ve had posts set to /postname/ and pages set to pagename.htm and it seemed to work. But generally I recommend matching both posts and pages.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Hi Marlos, thanks for a quick response. I tried that before and it didn’t seem to work, but I just tried it again and it looks pretty good.

    My only remaining question is: in my old setup, the blog home page (where the latest blog posts appear in abbreviated form) had the URL sitename/blog/ whereas now this too has the .shtml extension. Is there a way for me to amend the code to not have the extension here, or is this treated like any other page and cannot be changed? (In which case, I’ll just use a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file, but it would be nicer to have the blog home page treated like a post rather than a page if I could.)

    Thanks heaps. Regardless, this plugin looks to solve my main problem, and I have tried several plugins and several code additions that haven’t worked for me.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Oops, just found another issue, I’m sorry.

    I have a two level page structure, so some pages appear as sitename/mainpage1.shtml and then subpages appear as sitename/mainpage1/subpage1.shtml.

    Your plugin is getting the mainpage1.shtml correct, and but the subpage comes out as sitename/mainpage1/subpage1/. Does it only work on top order pages? Again, is there some code I could add to do the second order pages?

    Thanks again. Sorry to bother you.

    Plugin Author Marios Alexandrou

    (@marios-alexandrou)

    Is /blog/ a category?

    Subpages are supported and should work without any code customization. When you go to the Edit Page for the subpage and click on edit Permalink at the top, what do you see?

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Hi Marios, thank you for being so helpful, I really appreciate it.

    The subpages problem was mine, not your plugin. Some of the links didn’t update properly, but I have sorted that out now. I’m sorry to get that wrong. So, yes, it is now showing sitename/mainpage1/subpage1.shtml just as it should.

    Blog was listed among the categories in the Posts, Categories section of the Dashboard, but I don’t know why. But I deleted it and it didn’t make any difference, then I reinstated it and still no difference. Why did you ask? Does this determine whether the extension appears or not?

    Thanks you again for giving me your time. So far the problems have all been at my end, and I appreciate your patience, and apologise for my mistakes.

    Plugin Author Marios Alexandrou

    (@marios-alexandrou)

    I asked about /blog/ just to try and understand why it might have an unexpected extension. It can be tricky to diagnose problems via a forum ??

    So your last remaining issue is that you’ve got /blog.shtml instead of /blog/? Otherwise all page, post, and category URLs are as you want them?

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Yes, it is tricky, I appreciate you trying.

    Yes, the blog home page is my last remaining issue. I’m not sure what you mean by category URL. If you mean a category archive, it comes out fine – sitename/blog/category/categoryname/. The pages and subpages are now fine. And the individual posts are fine too (no extension) because I’ve not added the extension to the permalinks.

    I guess I can understand why the blog home page has a .shtml extension, for it is after all a page, not a post, so you might expect it to behave the same as other pages. But the site static home page is also a page and it doesn’t have the extension added. Is this a clue to the answer to my problem?

    Thanks again.

    Plugin Author Marios Alexandrou

    (@marios-alexandrou)

    The homepage I think is a special case where even if you set it to be a static page, an extension doesn’t get added. I’ve tested that myself.

    Out of curiosity, if you type in the blog home page without the extension does it load without the URL changing?

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Hi again. Sorry for delay, I’m in Australia and I was sleeping!

    No, if I remove the extension I get a “Not found error 404”.

    Curiously, while the extension is added normally for all pages (i.e. sitename/page.shtml) for the blog page the trailing / is retained (sitename/blog.shtml/).

    It would be nice to resolve this, but really, it works as it is, and I can fix incoming links with a redirect. So if you have a solution I’d appreciate it, but if you don’t, I wouldn’t want to take up your time, I really appreciate your plugin and your help so far.

    Thanks.

    Plugin Author Marios Alexandrou

    (@marios-alexandrou)

    I don’t have a solution for this last item. It’s a strange one. It could turn out to be something simple, but I can’t reproduce it on my test site.

    If you have any new thoughts about it, let me know as they may make me think of something.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Hi Marios, I really appreciate your help. Here is my summary.

    There are a number of pieces of code out there that add the .html extension simply by changing the permalink structure, which of course only affects posts. I have found this one) which adds the extension to both posts (via permalinks) and pages (by adding code to the functions.php file), but if I don’t add to the permalinks then the pages extension doesn’t seem to work either. I would have used that if it worked the way I wanted, because adding specific code is generally more efficient than adding a plugin.

    There are several other plugins out there, but they are all old and I didn’t find any that worked at all except yours. For example, this one was written less than 4 years ago, but several people have found it is now not working, and there is no response on the plugin support page.

    So yours is clearly the best option for me at the moment. Unfortunately my understanding of WordPress and php are too basic to allow me to diagnose or fix the issue we are discussing. My thought is that the static home page and the blog home page are two very specific things in WP, and somehow the static page is exempt from adding the extension, so you would think there would be a way to exempt the blog home page too.

    But it is a minor issue, and I can live with it, so I think I will go ahead and use it thanks (so far I have only installed it on a trial site). Thanks again.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Again, I’m going to have to correct myself. The link I posted now seems to be working the same as your plugin.

    I’m finding this really difficult to assess. Sometimes I try a plugin or some code and it doesn’t seem to work, but if I fiddle with the links (in the menus section of the dashboard, or in the text) I can sometimes get it to work. It happened to me when I first tested your plugin, and it seems to have happened with Carlos Fontanos’ code.

    I’m sorry to be so poor at assessing this. I think I’ll stop wasting your time and leave it where it is, thanks for all your time.

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
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