New rewrite rules for custom taxonomy and reuse default

Question

I have a taxonomy location. All terms except one are to be treated differently. That's why I have two php files

1. taxonomy-location.php
2. taxonomy-location-national.php

Now, I want to make the URLs SEO friendly.

If URL = example.com/localdeals/national, I want to redirect it to taxonomy-location-national.php

If URL = example.com/localdeals/%any-other-term%, I want to redirect it to taxonomy-location.php

Basically I do not want to write the name of above files in .htaccess. I want to, somehow, reuse the default WordPress rules.

i.e. WordPress already directs example.com/?location=national and example.com/?location=boston correctly. I want to add new rules on top of these and want to reuse them.

Is it possible?

Answer 1

Note that the url-rewriting doesn't directly determine the template used. A pretty url is interpreted as a query and then that query determines what template is used based on the template hierarchy.

So only need one rule:

example.com/localdeals/myterm => example.com/?location=myterm

WordPress will look for the template taxonomy-location-myterm.php and use that (if it exists) or otherwise fallback to taxonomy-location.php

To add the above rule, when you register your taxonomy:

  register_taxonomy('location','post',array(
    'hierarchical' => false,
     ...
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'localdeals' ),
     ...
  ));

(you will need to flush these rules once after changing these - if this is for a plug-in/theme, only flush on activation/de-activation). Otherwise, just visit Settings > Permlinks page, and they'll be flushed :).