Rewrite user profile URL to be human friendly

Question

I hope you can help. I have tried to follow this and am not able to get the desired result.

I am using a static WordPress page as the basis for displaying all user profiles on the front end.

That page is: mydomain.com/user-profile and the page has an id of 31848

When each user's profile is loaded on that page, the url looks like this (where '2053' is the ID of the current user being displayed):

mydomain.com/user-profile/?users_filter=2053

Instead I would like it to look like this:

mydomain.com/user-profile/username

I have tried to follow through and am unable to get this to work.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Best wishes, Andrew

Answer 1

The first step is to add a query var so WordPress will recognize it and parse its value in rewrite rules.

function wpd_query_vars( $query_vars ) {
    $query_vars[] = 'users_filter_name';
    return $query_vars;
}
add_filter( 'query_vars', 'wpd_query_vars' );

Next, add a rewrite rule to capture the requests and set the users_filter_name:

function wpd_user_rewrite_rule(){
    add_rewrite_rule(
        '^user-profile/([^/]*)/?',
        'index.php?page_id=31848&users_filter_name=$matches[1]',
        'top'
    );
}
add_action( 'init', 'wpd_user_rewrite_rule' );

Don't forget to flush rewrite rules after they change.

Then you can access the query var in the template and load that user:

if( $users_filter_name = get_query_var( 'users_filter_name' ) ){
    $user = get_user_by( 'slug', $users_filter_name );
    if( !empty( $user ) ){
        echo $user->ID; // your original users_filter value
    }
}