Pagination posts. Url format

Question

i'm using pagination for very long posts. So i have a problem here. I'm not happy with standard utl structure (where is couple personal reasons for that in my project). For example, i have post

/post.htm

and i need to get second page of it with

/post2.htm

not

/post.htm/2

I'm sure that i won't create post/page with slug post2 How can i change standard url in a such way? I tried this

add_action( 'init', 'wpa5413_init' );
function wpa5413_init()
{
    add_rewrite_rule('^([^/]+)([0-9]{1,2}).htm$','$matches[1].htm/$matches[2]','top');
}

But it doesn't work...

Answer 1

Your rewrite rule format is not correct. The $rewrite argument must point to index.php with query vars set so WordPress can create the default query:

add_action( 'init', 'wpa103850_init' );
function wpa103850_init()
{
    add_rewrite_rule(
        '^([^/]+)([0-9]{1,2}).htm$',
        'index.php?name=$matches[1]&page=$matches[2]',
        'top'
    );
}

However, this will still not work correctly, due to the canonical redirect. WordPress wants to enforce a single URL for any given post/page. You'll have to remove that filter to prevent that from happening, but note that this will have other possibly undesirable side-effects, as no canonical redirects will happen.

remove_filter( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical' );

It may be possible to selectively apply the canonical redirect, but I haven't the time to go digging in source at the moment to determine that!