Permalink structure in Wordpress - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Customizing Permalink Structure in WordPress

📖 Scenario: You are building a blog website using WordPress. You want to make your post URLs easy to read and remember by customizing the permalink structure.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to set up a custom permalink structure in WordPress to improve URL readability and SEO.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable to hold the default permalink structure string

Add a variable to hold the new custom permalink structure string

Use the WordPress function update_option to set the new permalink structure

Flush rewrite rules using flush_rewrite_rules to apply changes

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Customizing permalinks helps make website URLs user-friendly and better for search engines.

💼 Career

WordPress developers often need to configure permalinks for client websites to improve usability and SEO.

1

Set the default permalink structure

Create a variable called default_permalink and set it to the string '/archives/%post_id%' which represents the default permalink structure.

Wordpress

// Create a variable called $default_permalink and set it to '/archives/%post_id%'
// Your code here

Need a hint?

The default permalink structure uses the post ID inside the URL after '/archives/'.

2

Define a new custom permalink structure

Create a variable called custom_permalink and set it to the string '/%category%/%postname%/' which will show category and post name in URLs.

Wordpress

$default_permalink = '/archives/%post_id%';
// Create a variable called $custom_permalink and set it to '/%category%/%postname%/'
// Your code here

Need a hint?

The new permalink structure includes the category and post name for better readability.

3

Update WordPress permalink option

Use the WordPress function update_option with the first argument 'permalink_structure' and the second argument custom_permalink to update the permalink setting.

Wordpress

$default_permalink = '/archives/%post_id%';
$custom_permalink = '/%category%/%postname%/'; 
// Use update_option to set 'permalink_structure' to $custom_permalink
// Your code here

Need a hint?

This function changes the permalink structure setting in WordPress.

4

Flush rewrite rules to apply changes

Call the WordPress function flush_rewrite_rules with no arguments to refresh the permalink rules and apply the new structure.

Wordpress

$default_permalink = '/archives/%post_id%';
$custom_permalink = '/%category%/%postname%/'; 
update_option('permalink_structure', $custom_permalink);
// Call flush_rewrite_rules() to apply the new permalink structure
// Your code here

Need a hint?

This function refreshes WordPress's URL rules so the new permalink structure works immediately.