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Part of my work is to create Wordpress websites. I usually work on my laptop until I have something good enough to be uploaded to the test server where the client reviews it.

I create a VirtualHost for every new project so I'm always working with a Wordpress installation in a domain that looks like http://local.example.com/, but when the site is uploaded to the test server (not controlled by me), the domain may end being something like http://testserver.com/arbitrary/path/example/.

The problem is that if I add a custom link to a menu that points to, for example, /events/, it would work fine locally creating a link to http://local.example.com/events/, but in the test server, the link will point to http://testserver/events/, which is obviously not right.
What I want is to give the custom link an URL that would work both on my local environment and the test server.

I already handle the problem of changing the home and siteurl Wordpress options by:

  • changing those settings on the local database
  • creating a dump of the database
  • update the database on the server
  • restoring the local options.

I don't want to use full URLs for the custom links and having to replace those with the server URL every time I need to update the server's database.

For links inside the post content, there is a plugin that solves the problem adding two shortcodes: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/url-shortcodes/, but I haven't been able to find something similar for Custom Links.

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    Willington, i cant help you to an url that works anywhere. What i can do is point you to spectacu.la/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases. I've been using David's search&replace for quite some time and i works good to change e.g. url's - even when in serialized data. So that is how i do it: just hardcoded links and convert after moving the database to another domain. Good luck, Peter
    – Peter
    Commented Mar 11, 2011 at 21:30
  • So far the only way that I've found to successfully move from a dev environment to a live environment is after doing the SQL dump to do a search and replace on the entire file, not just change the home and siteurl options. I've had files where the URL was in there over 1000 times. (still don't know how it managed to get that high :) )
    – Rob Williams
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 9:26
  • @Peter, @Rob thank you guys for answering, I was afraid that search-and-replace was the only solution but wanted to ask first. I'll take a look at that script.
    – Willington Vega
    Commented Mar 13, 2011 at 22:34
  • Best is to use a script like the one I suggested. Notice that a text search & replace in a db dump will screw up serialized data (especially found in wp_options) if and when the length of the search and replace strings is not the same, since that data is stored in the db with a length specification. Success, Peter
    – Peter
    Commented Mar 14, 2011 at 8:42

5 Answers 5

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I was also looking for a solution for this and I found simple one.

This is what you need to place into the URL field:

/index.php/internal-site-name

enter image description here

It works just fine!

Best Regards Chris

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    This works but it also changes the url to include the index.php. In the case of a single page application with # links, it would first refresh the page and then take you to the destination (only the first time). Even so, a good idea
    – Catalin Deaconescu
    Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 9:45
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    I used /something without the index.php part and seems to work
    – user3808307
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 6:37
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You can use the nav_menu_link_attributes filter to inspect and modify the href attribute for each menu item before it is output.

In this example, we look for any href attributes that start with a /, and prepend the test site URL in that case:

function wpd_nav_menu_link_atts( $atts, $item, $args, $depth ){
    if( '/' == substr( $atts['href'], 0, 1 ) ){
        $atts['href'] = 'http://testserver.com/example' . $atts['href'];
    }
    return $atts;
}
add_filter( 'nav_menu_link_attributes', 'wpd_nav_menu_link_atts', 20, 4 );

You could create a simple plugin with this code and activate it only on your test server, or create some sort of flag that conditionally applies this filter when the test site environment is present.

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    That's the best way I found! But please @Milo, change the third line with this smarter wordpress base url (get's the site_url of wordpress): $atts['href'] = site_url() . $atts['href'];
    – gtamborero
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 21:03
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Using <base href=" "> tag in the head meta will give a base url to all the relative anchors in the page.

Reference:
https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html
12.4 Path information: the BASE element

Relative custom links in wordpress:
If you want the site url to be the base url of all anchors add this to the theme / header.php within the <head> :

<base href="<?php echo site_url(); ?>/">

i know could be late for you but could help someone else.

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  • Looks promising. I'll test it out and report back.
    – Eric Hepperle - CodeSlayer2010
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 19:22
  • Doesn't work with paths like ehepperle.com/sites/in-progress/some-wp-site-root/ unless you explicitly set the site root. Web development speed is not noticeably improved using base tag, since when you migrate to another site, you will have to re-define what base is. However, I can see the value in reducing the length of href values.
    – Eric Hepperle - CodeSlayer2010
    Commented Apr 5, 2019 at 19:32
  • The Idea is good but seems that Wordpress ignores the Base path when using relative paths on wp custom menus (for example: /contact)
    – gtamborero
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 20:56
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On a custom URL in the Menu setup it is possible to use relative links to the [blogurl]. The secret is to start the relative URL with a single /. When a single / starts the custom URL the system will not prepend the typical http:// and then the current blogURL will be generated in the target URL at execution time.

EXAMPLE
If you want to go to your home page, simply put / as the custom URL

If you want to go to the index page in the folder bbforums then put /bbforums as the custom URL.

This allows you to move a site to a test domain without having to hard code the new blogURL in all the custom links for the menus.

For Example:
If my blog is http://example.com and I want to test it in a subdomain http://test.example.com the site can be moved between test and production without menu problems using the relative URL convention noted above. I have successfully tested this approach using the XCloner plugin to move the site.

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    This doesn't work for blog URLs that have slashes, for example example.com/blog. Following the menu item '/' would just take you to example.com.
    – Jimbali
    Commented Oct 3, 2014 at 11:11
1

First you have to install this plugin for URL shortcodes.

Add this code to your functions.php file in your theme:

class description_walker extends Walker_Nav_Menu {
    function start_el( &$output, $item, $depth, $args ) {
        global $wp_query;
        $indent = ( $depth ) ? str_repeat( "\t", $depth ) : '';

        $class_names = $value = '';

        $classes = empty( $item->classes ) ? array() : (array) $item->classes;

        $class_names = join( ' ', apply_filters( 'nav_menu_css_class', array_filter( $classes ), $item ) );
        $class_names = ' class="'. esc_attr( $class_names ) . '"';

        $output .= $indent . '<li id="menu-item-'. $item->ID . '"' . $value . $class_names .'>';

        $attributes  = ! empty( $item->attr_title ) ? ' title="'  . esc_attr( $item->attr_title ) . '"' : '';
        $attributes .= ! empty( $item->target )     ? ' target="' . esc_attr( $item->target     ) . '"' : '';
        $attributes .= ! empty( $item->xfn )        ? ' rel="'    . esc_attr( $item->xfn        ) . '"' : '';

        // echo $item->url;
        $string = explode( '::', $item->url, 3 );
        if ( $string[1] ) {
            $string[1] = str_replace( '-', ' ', $string[1] );
            $item->url = do_shortcode( "[$string[1]]" ); 
        }

        $attributes .= ! empty( $item->url )        ? ' href="'   . esc_attr( $item->url        ) .'"' : '';

        $prepend = '<strong>';
        $append = '</strong>';
        $description  = ! empty( $item->description ) ? '<span>' . esc_attr( $item->description ) . '</span>' : '';

        if ( $depth != 0 ) {
            $description = $append = $prepend = "";
        }

        $item_output  = $args->before;
        $item_output .= '<a'. $attributes . '>';
        $item_output .= $args->link_before . $prepend . apply_filters( 'the_title', $item->title, $item->ID ) . $append;
        $item_output .= $description . $args->link_after;
        $item_output .= '</a>';
        $item_output .= $args->after;

        $output .= apply_filters( 'walker_nav_menu_start_el', $item_output, $item, $depth, $args );
    } 
}

Then you have to call the wp_nav_menu function from the templates files:

$arg = array( 
    'menu'        => "main-menu", 
    'echo'        => true, 
    'fallback_cb' => 'wp_page_menu', 
    'depth'       => 0, 
    'walker'      => new description_walker() 
); 
wp_nav_menu( $arg );

That's it. Then go to the back-end menu section.

For example, if I want to give the page URL to a custom link, I will add it like this:

http://::blogurl-id='1302'::

Now you can go to the front-end and check that the shortcode works.

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