how do I encode links to specific archive searches?

Question

I want to embed links to the archive pages with specific search criteria. i.e Links to specific categories, links to specific authors etc etc

At the moment I am adding the links using anchor tags, but these will fail if the permalinks change

Answer 1

Well, WordPres can generate these - so can you using its functions.

For category it would be something like:

$category =  get_category_by_slug( 'example' );
$link = get_category_link( $category->term_id );

Similarly there is get_tag_link() and on deeper level they all really use get_term_link()

Didn't play much with authors, there is the_author_posts_link() and probably some get_ analogue.

Answer 2

Category archives, author archives, date archives, etc will not experience permalink changes. If you're using pretty permalinks, http://yourblog.com/category/my-cool-category will always present you with a list of posts from my-cool-category. Likewise, http://yourblog.com/author/mildfuzz will always present you with a list of posts published by mildfuzz.

The only tricky part is if you want to display other information on the archive page (like an author bit for an author archive) ... but there are tutorials available for that kind of work.