Permalink structure /page/page/cpt-post gives 404 with pagination

Question

I'm trying to achieve this permalink structure:

• Page "about-us"
  • Page "stories"
    • Post (story CPT) "post-title"

The page "stories" is a custom page template that shows archive for custom post type "story", it needs to be a page template so I can edit the content, and should also have pagination for posts.

So domain.com/about-us/stories/ should show "story" CPT archive with pagination and domain.com/about-us/stories/story-title/ should show a single story.

I seem to get either the archive page pagination, or the post permalink to work, but not both.

If I set my CPT rewrite like

'rewrite' => array(
        'slug'                  => __('about-us/stories', 'text-domain'),
        'with_front'            => false,
        'pages'                 => true,
        'feeds'                 => false,
    )

The post permalink works just as expected, and I can follow a link to domain.com/about-us/stories/story-title/ and that's all fine, but the pagination on domain.com/about-us/stories/ won't work and gives a 404 error when changing page. If I set my CPT rewrite like

'rewrite' => array(
        'slug'                  => __('stories', 'text-domain'),
        'with_front'            => false,
        'pages'                 => true,
        'feeds'                 => false,
    )

the pagination on archive page works, but the post permalinks are now domain.com/stories/story-title and not domain.com/about-us/stories/story-title/

I also tried playing with add_rewrite_tag and add_rewrite_rule but can't seem to work my way around this problem. Is this permalink structure possible or should do I just need to settle for different url structure for single posts?

Answer 1

Managed to get this working with a little help from Debug This plugin and some little hints from similar questions. At least so far, after some quick testing, I haven't come across any negative side effects.

The problem, if I understood correctly, is that if I have my cpt rewrite set to same slug as my archive page /about-us/stories, WP rewrites pagination requests /about-us/stories/page/n/ to a CPT named "page" which in this case returns 404.

To fix this I needed to make a custom rewrite rule to check if we're querying for a page number and rewrite it accordingly:

function wpse288130_rewrite_rules() {

    add_rewrite_rule('^(.?.+?)/page/(\d)$', 'index.php?pagename=$matches[1]&paged=$matches[2]', 'top');

}
add_action('init', 'wpse288130_rewrite_rules');

Where the regex's first capturing group (.?.+?) catches the page name about-us/stories and the second group (\d) catches any digit after /page/

In the second parameter of add_rewrite_rule we tell WP to rewrite this as index.php?pagename=about-us/stories&paged=[page number]

Third parameter 'top' tells WP to prioritize this rewrite above default rewrites.