rcwatson

Ok, this permalink editor plugin seems to do what is desired here, with one quirk…a redirect is involved vs. just leaving the URL as typed.

I can create a page such as https://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal and make it a child of the press-room page. Like this:

Press Room
— Wall Street Journal

That is what nontechnical admins will want to see when browsing the All Pages listing in WordPress.

Then, in the wall-street-journal page, I can click the “Customise” button in the editor (under the page title) to “shorten” that to https://example.com/wall-street-journal.

When a user visits https://example.com/wall-street-journal, it redirects to https://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

That at least solves the problem of how to make an easy-to-speak URL while maintaining a proper parent/child hierarchy. But the drawback is that you’re redirecting, which may be jarring or unwelcome to some users.

What kind of redirect (301?) it’s doing is not clear until I dig into the code more. That’s important for SEO.

Looking at it this way, I guess my other solution, which I’ve been using for vanity URL management for some time now works just as well.

For that, I installed the plugin named “Redirection”, which has let me set up case-sensitive vanity URLs such as https://example.com/forWSJ and https://example.com/forwsj and whatever other variants I need to have point to https://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

It can do double duty for simulating a “flattened hierarchy” scheme on the front end in that I can leave my All Pages hierarchy undisturbed and set up a redirect (with a choice of http codes). So, a salesperson knows to say https://example.com/wall-street-journal which will redirect to https://example.com/press-room/wall-street-journal.

You’ll have to decide whether your audiences will find it jarring that a redirect occurs upon entering the vanity URL.

I did a bit of digging around and found a plugin that seems to have been created, right around the time I posted this or after, to solve this problem.

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/permalink-editor/screenshots/

I’ll give it a shot on my dev server and update you here.

Nope. Wish I had. Any ideas? This issue is 8 months old, so I’d imagine a plugin was written by someone somewhere.

Ok, thanks Rev. Voodoo. Still can’t figure out why it’s showing for only one post and not others, nor how to make that go away (peace of mind at this point…inconsistency in my WordPress installs keeps me up at night, believe it or not). ??

Hopefully it didn’t have anything to do with the sticky posts glitch.

It appears to have something to do with this:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Post_Formats

but I can’t figure out where to un-set this. I don’t remember ever setting it.

Keesiemeijer, thanks. I just tried setting the sticky posts up again and now it’s working (putting three on the page as I had specified), so that must have been a temporary glitch that somehow cleared itself.

But what’s this “Standard” designation next to just this one post? Can’t figure it out.

Thanks. That gave me keywords to find this article:

https://praveenlobo.com/techblog/how-to-remove-the-blog-slug-from-the-permalinksurl-in-wordpress-multisite-installation-without-a-plugin/

Just updating the Network Admin Edit screen, but not the Site Admin Settings Permalinks screen did the trick. The /blog slug still shows next to the box on Site Admin Settings Permalinks, but is ignored due to the “true” setting change in Network Admin Edit.

Thanks, Ipstenu. Can you elaborate on “there’s a way to do that in the database”?

Per the recommendation to find the permalink structure in the Edit Site screen and remove /blog/ from it, I tried that, but it only resulted in all my links being broken. In the Permalinks screen of the site, the Custom Structure, Category base, and Tag base fields are still preceded with an un-editable /blog string.

What am I in need of still to get back to not having /blog/ in my URLs?

Radiok, yet another encouragement to re-release Register Plus Redux. I have a need for it on a sub-site of a multi-site install.

If you know of something I can use in the interim, I’m open to suggestions. Tried Pie Register, but it doesn’t allow me to use it on sub-sites. Just on the main blog’s login and registration.

Thanks for the tip. I looked all over the app store and there is nothing close to being able to edit theme files. But that’s not the real problem. I can do virtually everything I’d need to do on the go via the web-based Dashboard in Safari Mobile, including editing of theme files via the Theme Editor screen. Right now that screen tells me i need proper write permissions set on the files in the theme folder on the server. Until i do, it won’t show the “save” button until the per
permissions are set to be open enough, so I can type changes into the window, but I can’t save them.

While I know how to change those permissions via FTP or Unix prompt, I can only get the theme editor “save” button to appear when I choose 777 permission mask (wide open to hackers). Tutorials and the Codex recommend 666 as the mask, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for the editor to show the “save” button.

I used Notepad++ and also an editor that is built into SmartFTP. Same as I always do with no problems. But somewhere along the way, Windows character codes got into it and weren’t visible and Notepad++ couldn’t shake them, so I kept editing and uploading in ignorance. It was only when I used pure vi and typed it all out by hand that I was able to have success. Lesson learned.

Thanks for all the help the past couple of days, though.

SOLVED! I tailed the error log for this instance when .htaccess contains the code above, which triggers the Internal Server 500 error.

The error message in the log is:

[Thu Aug 18 02:02:21 2011] [alert] [client nnn.nnn.nnn.n] /usr1/webroot/example/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbf#', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Searching on the Invalid command string, I found this article, which solved the issue handily.

I hate Windows.

Thanks for clarifying on whether it was truly .htaccess. Now that it’s narrowed down, can you offer any advice, based on the code I linked to, as to what might not be in place in .htaccess or my vhost settings?