Internal linking when on a shared IP

Question

I have a WordPress site in a temporary location, and the site URL is an IP address followed by slash, tilde and the short site name. I also have a number of internal links in the pages that assume linking from the root - <a href="/services"> - for example. Now these links do not work in the testing environment because of the shared IP.

Does anyone know what I can do to make my internal links work, no matter where the site lives?

UPDATE: I'm trying to update links (and the SRC of uploaded images) in the page content, not in a template file.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I think I'm going to just go the manual route and drop in absolute URLs.

Answer 1

You can wrap the links in echo home_url($path) to have them printed relative to the site. So your link would be coded as:

<a href="<?php echo home_url('/services')?>">

Answer 2

Add a shortcode that refers the site url like this in your functions.php, or use a plugin like this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/peters-blog-url-shortcodes/

Then your links can just be written like this: <a href="[blogurl]/services"> and they will still work when you move the site to a different server.

Answer 3

What you ask for is quite similar to what users experience when they move their site - they need to update links in all content to make changes. This is normally done by executing a SQL-query on the database to change all posts at once (Reference).

Keep in mind that this constantly changes all links. This is probably not what you want to.

For a temporary change, I suggest to buffer wordpress' output and then do either a best-guessed replace with preg_replace_all() or preg_replace_callback() and some regex or to do it safe by using fluentDOM and changing all links with ease by using it with the output buffer.

If this is for testing only, I would do the second, temporary method. This will actually prevent that the original content got changed, so this is on viewing the frontend of the blog only.