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.

1. Open the "post.php" file in wp-admin\includes
2. 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:

3. 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!

Tags: Wordpress

Of course I don't mean "hack" in the bad sense. This page is about the plugins, modifications, and tricks I've found to improve the operation of WordPress. In some cases, it's stuff that they didn't think about. In some cases, they made decisions about program behavior that I don't agree with. In either case, I've found that when I need a fix, but can't find it online already, there's plenty of other people who need it to. So here you go; enjoy!

For some reason, the WordPress team removed the ability to simply get the file path to your theme folder. Here’s how to get it quickly:

$url = get_bloginfo("template_url");
$temp = explode("wp-content/themes/",$url);
$active_theme_name = $temp[1];	// The second value will be the theme name
$theme_path =get_theme_root()."/".$active_theme_name; 

When done, $theme_path will be the file path from the root of your current system to your active theme’s folder.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

So there's a bunch of vulnerabilities in older versions of wordpress. There are other reasons to upgrade besides security.

For example, just going from 2.0 to 2.1, I could see a ton of usability features that made my site much easier to manage. And when I read about 2.2 and how a error in your code wouldn't break your site, I wished I had upgraded then. The very next day, I made a coding error in one of my plugins and my site was down the whole day until I could get back to my home machine.

Either way, besides feature upgrades, each version includes better security so it's best to keep current.