How can I create a permalink with two categories, with the order based on the parent category?

Question

Basically, I'd like to create a category permalink like example.com/books/adventure without having to make adventure a child-category because it will apply to other categories as well.

So the end result is:

example.com/books/adventure

example.com/movies/adventure

example.com/toys/adventure

The order is based on the two parent categories, with "items" going first, and "genre" going second.

And you could also search the categories separately to see all of the books, or all of the adventure items.

How can I do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

David, welcome to wordpress answers. The answer is: Switch to some other platform. Wordpress can not with what's currently in core produce such a result easily.

Technically spoken it's possible, but folks hate me here to say how (well Apache + PHP) in concrete, so I don't tell it because I fear the negative karma this give on this site.

Just switch to something else if you seriously want to do such stuff and more. Like symfony2 with a database layer. After about one to three month as a single developer you can achieve much more then you can imagine with wordpress.

And the best thing is: You can even add a wordpress blog later on. ;)

Answer 2

It is not possible. And if it were, I wouldn’t recommend it, because WP cannot handle categories in permalinks well.

But there is a solution: Use custom post types. Books and movies require a lot of different meta data. You may want ISBN, editor, publisher, number of pages etc. for books and actors, director, screen format for movies. CPTs are made for this; the codex has an example for books.

Both post types may share a custom taxonomy. Justin Tadlock has written a very nice tutorial about this feature, and he has made a website with books and movies and where you can see how the result may look. As an example: You can browse the genre adventure at popcritics.com/genres/adventure.

That’s not exactly what you asked for, but it is a solution you probably like more than your initial request, once you’ve got used to it. ;)

Answer 3

There is a plugin to pull custom fields into the permalink, though the problem is if certain content does not have custom fields, then you end up with 2 forward slashes in the url.

http://tec.toi-planning.net/wp/custom-fields-permalink