We’ve been hacking a lot on WordPress lately, spread out over various sites… and I really have to wonder who made some of the design decisions or if, like most of the PHP I (and a good portion of the world) write, some parts of it were never designed and were instead grown. The result is some really idiotic default behavior for which there’s no easy workaround when you want to do something remotely out of the norm.
Take, for example, using category stubs as part of your perma-link URLs. A good many advanced themes have “meta categories” – Arthemia, for example, which we’ve hacked up for Hungry Hackers, has two: “headline” of which the latest post is shown up the top left, and “featured” of which several are shown on the top right.
It stands to reason you’re going to add these categories first, and then as your site develops you’ll be adding more later on. Well, when constructing a perma-link URL for a post, if you’re using /%category%/%postname%/, the lowest ID category is chosen for the “main” category, whose stub will be used to craft the perma-link – and there doesn’t appear to be any way to change that.
Sure you could make all your categories first, and then the “meta” ones later – but what happens later on when you want to add another category to an established site? Nightmare category juggling, or having featured articles having the URL /featured/some-great-article/. The worst part is, if an article is in two categories and you try to access it via the stub of a different one, it 404s. So at some point you have a really popular featured article, it gets a shitload of back-links, then you move it out of the “featured” group for some reason – all those back-links are useless. They 404.
Even if you’re not using any “meta” categories, in my opinion this is still silly behavior. It stands to reason that in most sites that grow in a sane way, the highest IDed category is going to be the most significantly relevant category. Think about it, your site is small and you start out writing about Flowers, putting all your articles in “/flowers/”. Later on, you add two new categories for “indoor” and “outdoor” – it’d make more sense for the URL to be based off the more specific category… except of course you have that whole 404 thing going on if you so much as move a post to another category.
I started out hacking on the WP-core, it’s simply a matter of swapping two comparison operators in _usort_terms_by_ID() and the highest ID category’s selected. Of course this might break shit in future, and would cause a ton of URLs to 404 if I update the WordPress core at some point and neglect to re-hack the change. But it’s really quite an easy hack in wp-includes/category-template.php (swap the underlined operators):
function _usort_terms_by_ID( $a, $b ) {
if ( $a->term_id > $b->term_id )
return 1;
elseif ( $a->term_id < $b->term_id )
I reverted that though, because I didn’t want to have to remember to do it with every WP patch. The very first “click here to update” notice could spell a whole lot of un-indexed content in search engines…
In the end, I ended up just re-numbering my meta categories to 999 and 1000, and hoping I don’t ever create 999 categories to cause a conflict. It was simply a matter of removing all posts from those categories, then editing the SQL database tables.
Update the term_ids in wp_terms and make them match in wp_term_taxonomy, and you’re good to go. That is, until such a time as you end up making your 999th category, so perhaps I should have selected a number just a little higher? ;D
