How much control do we have over CPT rewrite slugs? Can I create a "root" page for my CPT with out the page path, and then have paths for other pages?

Question

Say I have a CPT called I dunno, "Library" which is just a set of "pages" ("has_archive" => false) and the rewrite slug is "library". I also intend to have a set of pages like "about", "archive", and "new books".

Can I do something so that I make a page called "home" and instead of its url being https://example.org/library/home could it be https://example.org/library? And then the about page would have the url of https://example.com/library/about

NOTE - I know that I could set the rewrite slug to "/" and then create a new page named "library" and then make things like the "about" or "archive" pages children of "library" but I feel like is just an extra step my users are going to be unhappy about having to do.

And if I made a second CPT, "library-books" would there be away to set its rewrite slug to "library/books" or would I need a totally different path? so I would want https://example.org/library/books to be the archive for the "library-books" CPT and then https://example.org/library/books/book-title for the individual book posts.

Answer 1

The way I see it, you could do:

// Via the init hook, do all these:

register_post_type( 'library-books', [
    'public'      => true,
    'label'       => 'Library Books',
    'rewrite'     => [ 'with_front' => false, 'slug' => 'library/books' ],
    'has_archive' => 'library/books',
    // other args here
] );

register_post_type( 'library', [
    'public'      => true,
    'label'       => 'Libraries',
    'rewrite'     => [ 'with_front' => false, 'slug' => 'library' ],
    'has_archive' => false,
    // other args here
] );

add_rewrite_rule( '^library/?$', 'index.php?library=home', 'top' );

I.e.

• Register the library-books CPT first, with library/books as the rewrite slug as well as has_archive.

• Then register the library CPT with library as the rewrite slug, and has_archive set to false.

• And register a custom rewrite rule for the example.com/library which (internally) loads example.com/library/home (which is a post of the library CPT, although you can really modify the rewrite rule's query to load a post of a different post type such as page).

But of course, in your library CPT, you shouldn't have a post with books as the slug.