Must permalinks always point to single post pages?

Question

Suppose that I have a blog with few posts per month, and no comments, and I don't want to show posts in single post pages, but always "in context" (say, together with the posts in its month - or perhaps a week?). To accomplish this, I'd need to use permalinks with fragment identifiers (#), among other things. I wonder if this is supported, or if someone can point me to some resource or discussion.

Edited: I posted in my own answer the details of my implementation.

Answer 1

There are two hooks named 'pre_post_link' and 'post_link'. Their first argument – which you can change – is the permalink. So …

add_filter( 'pre_post_link', 'wpse_42406_change_permalink', 10, 2 );

function wpse_42406_change_permalink( $permalink, $post )
{
    // change the permalink, let it point to an archive etc.
    return $permalink;
}

… will change the output.

In your loop you probably use something like …

<li id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

Your permalink could then point to the archive page of your choice plus #post-$post->ID. For example:

http://example.com/2012/04/#post-42

Answer 2

Just open your theme files and remove the a tags from the title.

Example: In your index.php file if you had:

<h2>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
    <?php the_title(); ?></a>
</h2>

it would become:

<h2 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

Answer 3

Just in case some visitor find this info useful, I post my working implementation. It requires a little plugin.

In this implementation, the permalinks will show the monthly archive - but the url will still be "complete", i.e., include the post title - In this way, 1) I have more freedom if I wish to change this schema later, without breaking the permalinks, and 2) I have meaningful stats for my visits (I can know which individual posts was visited from my logs).

In the admin page I specify this permalinks structure :

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%  
eg: http://example.com/myblog/2012/01/sample_post

But the final permalink will be of the form:

http://example.com/myblog/2012/01/sample_post#post-234

The fragment identifier is added by the following hook in the plugin:

/* adds hash */
function hjg_change_permalink( $permalink, $post ) {
    //if(strpos($permalink,'#')) return $permalink;
    return $permalink . "#post-" . $post->ID;   
}

add_filter( 'post_link', 'hjg_change_permalink', 100, 2 );

I also hoooked the following in the plugin, so that the permalinks, despite looking as individual posts url, are interpreted as archives:

function hjg_parse_request( $wp ) {
   if(! isset($wp->query_vars)) return;
   if(! isset($wp->query_vars['year'])) return;
   $wp->query_vars['name']=''; // remove post name
}

add_action( 'parse_request', 'hjg_parse_request');

My theme is inherited from the standard twenty-eleven, which already ads a "post-NNN" id to each post, in content.php :

   <article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?>>

if you are using other theme, you'd need to add or adapt this.

Remeber that, for this to work, your monthly archives should not be paged: you need to have a maximum number of posts per month, and set that value in the "posts-per-page" in the admin page. (I also tweaked the index.php file in my theme so that the front page shows a smaller number of posts).