laughingmuse

If you have multiple pointers to an entry, and you URL-ize the categories, search engines may take that amiss. Not a problem, perhaps, for those of us who are just playing around with personal sites (my own site is hardly part of the critical mass of entertainment on the web); but for any sites that want to attract traffic and have higher rankings, SE-friendly URLs are fairly important.
Also, having a clear, logical, navigable site structure can be very helpful for users.

Is it possible to “mark” one category as the primary, and use that one as the URL-generator?
I would also be very interested in having categories in the URL. I have part of my personal site organized not by date, but by category. I do have a more “traditional” blog-type section which is archived by like categories and by week, but I don’t use individual archives in that section.

Actually, I’m not a developer. I don’t have the knowledge, and don’t really have the patience to learn much more than low-level script customization and tweakage. It sounds like I may need to stick with my current tool for my personal site until WordPress’ output page type can be defined by the user.

Largely because, for my personal site, that’s how it was constructed. It’s been that way for just over three years, including directory structure, page titles, the whole megillah. I’ll fiddle endlessly with the stylesheet, and occasionally add in features of another section/category, but why break the links if I don’t have to? Changing to PHP would definitely break the links…or require a whole lot of extra redirect-placement, which I don’t care to do.
On some other sites that I have planned, it’s a different story ??

Thanks, guys. I guess I forgot to mention a few things.
I want the older entries to be integrated into WP because I want people to still be able to discuss them. Thus, simply having the older pages resident on the server is not sufficient.
I want to output .shtml pages, not PHP pages.

Skippy, thanks.
I guess saying “take a look at my site and read my mind” is going to get me gently thwapped about with a trout, hm? ??
I do have semi-dynamic pages using SSI calls right now, but I don’t really take full advantage of all the neat toys I could use with Apache SSI. Call me egregiously lazy.
What I want to do with WP:
Create .shtml pages, name based on the entry title.
SOLUTION: I’ve found that this is possible, and that there’s even a hack to turn the title from title-with-hyphens to title_with_underscores.
Store those entries into directories based on the category. In MT terms, the filepath is category_dirify.
SOLUTION: Haven’t actually researched this bit fully. See comment about me being egregiously lazy.
Actually have two different blogs to create the site (one for the “weblog” portion, one for the rest of the site – the articles, the games, et cetera – in MT terms, “individual entry” archiving.)
SOLUTION: multiple installations, at least until WP has multiple-blog capabilities
Keep the same templates – or as near as possible – so that the user sees no change to the site.
I really want the changeover to be seamless to site visitors, and I’d like to keep as much of the directory structure and page naming convention intact as I possibly can. I know that I can just put some 301 redirects into place; but I’d rather not go through that if I can avoid it. Once again…egregiously lazy. (Or scathingly efficient, your call ?? )