Question

How do you make page templates load based on a page’s entire url not just their slug?

Page templates load either page-{slug}.php or page-{id}.php.

I really want it to load page-{parent-slug}_{slug}.php.

So the url /hello/world would look for the template page-hello_world.php.

This should be recursive so the longer the page url the longer template filename.

There is no template_redirect documentation in the API.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is what I came up with. It works great and added it to the functions.php file in the theme’s folder:

function hierarchical_template() {
    global $post;       
    $permalink_array =
        array_filter(explode('/',str_replace(get_site_url(),'',get_permalink($post->ID))));     
    $template_redirect = false;     
    while ( count( $permalink_array ) ) {           
        $template = 'page-' . implode( '_', $permalink_array ) . '.php';            
        if(file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . '/' . $template)){
            include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/' . $template);
            exit;               
        }           
        array_shift($permalink_array);
    }
}

add_action('template_redirect', 'hierarchical_template');