Question

I’m trying to have SEO friendly URLs for my wordpress blog, while still having the flexibility to change a post’s title at will.

My permalink structure would be like this:

%post_id%/%postname%

However, I’d like wordpress to just consider the %post_id% from the URL when looking for the appropriate post (sort of like here on stackoverflow)

For example:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/810/crossbrowser is the same as https://stackoverflow.com/users/810/hello-world

I’d like all of these to point to the same post, the one with id 345:

http://myblog.com/345/the-name-of-the-post http://myblog.com/345/any-text http://myblog.com/345 

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The documentation mentions something that seems like what I’m trying to do: Long permalinks, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Here’s my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /  # Let wordpress use pretty permalinks RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]  # From the example in the documentation #RewriteRule /post/([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?p=$1&page=$2 [QSA] 

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UPDATE

I keep trying this RewriteRule in this online regular expression testing tool, but it doesn’t work when I put it in my .htaccess (just after RewriteBase):

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/?([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/?$ index.php?p=$1 [QSA] 

Answer 1

My response does not directly answer your question, but I think I have some points worth noting.

I’m trying to have SEO friendly URLs for my wordpress blog, while still having the flexibility to change a post’s title at will.

I’m not immediately seeing the benefit of your pursuit.

The obvious disadvantage of including the %post_id% is that it makes the URL longer and contains non-semantic information. WordPress already deals with the scenario in two ways:

1. The url (permalink/post name) doesn’t change when you change the title on a published post.

2. If you do change the permalink, the old permalink continues to work and redirects to the new permalink.