Generating a Rewrite Rule for sSecific Post-Requests from a Submitted Form?

Question

I have a form ( method post ) which makes it possible to filter my posts by specific criterias e.g. "Most Recent", "This week", "Last week", ...

It works fine but of course the URL is the same for each request. I dont want to change the send method to GET and change the URL with that trick. I'm looking for a solution where i can add a rewrite rule to the existing ones which would make it possible to have "dynamic" URLS like

http://myurl.com/most-recent
http://myurl.com/last-week
http://myurl.com/category-1/most-recent
http://myurl.com/category-1/last-week

The rewrite rule which lookes for the words "most-recent", "last-week", ... at the end of the url, removes those and then falls back to the normal rewrite rules. So those prdefined Post Request would work for categories, pages, posts, ...

I hope you guys can understand what i mean!

Answer 1

I imagine that wouldn't be too difficult. Assuming the number of custom 'dynamic' urls is known, this should do the trick:

foreach ( array( 'most-recent','last-week','category-1/most-recent','category-1/last-week') as $page )
  add_rewrite_rule( "$page/?$", 'index.php', 'top' );

What this does is tells WordPress "Whenever you have a url structure that matches X, treat it as if the url were just site.com/index.php, and check against this rule before anything else." WordPress will treat it as if it's the home page, but will also send the $_POST information from the form and get the correct information.

That first argument is a regular expression, so it might not be a bad idea to run each item through preg_quote() beforehand.

Hope that helped!

EDIT

I would strongly advise against using any sort of wildcard regular expression for this operation. Otherwise pages will start matching against this rule.

For our purposes think of these structures as having positions, separated by /. For example, in category-1/most-recent, position 1 would be category-1 and position 2 would be most-recent. So, for all structures make an array for each position with all the strings that might go into that position. So you might have something like this:

$timing = array(
  'most-recent',
  'last-week',
);
$cats = array(
  'category-1',
  'category-2',
  'category-3'
);
$timing = array_map( 'preg_quote', $timing );
$timing = implode( '|', $timing );
$cats = array_map( 'preg_quote', $cats );
$cats = implode( '|', $cats );
add_rewrite_rule( "($timing)/?$", 'index.php', 'top' );
add_rewrite_rule( "($cats)/($timing)/?$", 'index.php', 'top' );

Answer 2

i spent hours trying exactly what you wrote and although started googling and researching... it does simply not work. I although wrote a small functon which shows the rewrite rules in the admin. i made a screen shot and attached it and although some link. Would be great if you or somebody has an solution or idea....

here is one link which should work. i leave the categories out to simplify it a little bit.

http://localhost/myurl.com/summarizes/interviews/from-this-week

i'm not allowed to attach a screen shot, this is the rule which gets added

(from-this-week|from-this-month|since-big-bang)/?$ index.php (summarizes/interviews)/(from-this-week|from-this-month|since-big-bang)/?$ index.php