Hack WordPress to Make Postnames Always Editable

Saturday, November 7th, 2009 (No comments yet)

We want to have this postname control no matter what kind of permalink style we actually have.

There's probably a good reason that the WordPress development team took away our ability to modify the page postname (aka slug) when we don't have pretty permalinks active… Yes, a very good reason…

Well forget them! I want to be able to modify a postname no matter what. My development machine doesn't work with pretty permalinks so if I can't edit the postname directly in the edit screen, I have to go straight to the database to do it.

Why do I care? Well a lot of my custom code and heirarchy depends on the postnames. For example, how am I supposed to find all pages that are the child of the page named "Parent" if I can't name the damned page!?

Anyway… enough ranting. Here's the simple hack I found for fixing this vexing issue:

WARNING! I am not a WordPress developer and I have no idea at all if this hack will affect anything else negatively. For all I know, it could trigger nuclear war. Use at your own risk.

Open the "post.php" file in wp-admin\includes

Find these lines:

function get_sample_permalink_html($id, $new_title=null, $new_slug=null) {
	$post = &get_post($id);
	list($permalink, $post_name) = get_sample_permalink($post->ID, $new_title, $new_slug);
	if (false === strpos($permalink, '%postname%') && false === strpos($permalink, '%pagename%')) {
		return '';
	}

Can you see the problem yet? It tests for your permalink style and if it's not "pretty", it dumps out of the function. Easy to fix:

Change it by adding one line as shown here:

function get_sample_permalink_html($id, $new_title=null, $new_slug=null) {
	$post = &get_post($id);
	list($permalink, $post_name) = get_sample_permalink($post->ID, $new_title, $new_slug);
 
	// Add this line right here!
	$permalink = get_bloginfo("url")."/%postname%";
 
	if (false === strpos($permalink, '%postname%') && false === strpos($permalink, '%pagename%')) {
		return '';
	}

That's it! What we're doing is tricking wordpress into thinking that the page ALWAYS uses pretty permalinks. The rest of the code for editing the postname triggers and viola!