permalinks issue and archives

Question

I have an issue with a site running on WP 3.3 where when we make the permalink anything by "/%post_id%/%postname%/", the archive pages break and become 404s.

After some research, I came to understand why from a performance perspective, this is not a good practice, so I tried the suggested alternatives: "/%year%/%postname%/" and "/%post_id%/%postname%/"

Both suggestions worked, except that only with the post_id one, did archive urls become "/date/2012/11/" for example, and were found. Under any other permalink suggestion, they just were "/2012/11/" for example, and produced 404s.

Now the question is why does WP only put the word "date" in when the permalink is "/%post_id%/%postname%/"?

I figure it works with the "date" parts because it matches to "/date/%year%/%month%/".

As note, category and tag urls came out as usual and worked: example "/category/news" and "/tag/advice/".

Answer 1

Now the question is why does WP only put the word "date" in when the permalink is "/%post_id%/%postname%/"?

Because the WP_Rewrite class method get_date_permastruct only looks specifically for a clash between %date% and %post_id% tags.

To get this date structure with other numeric-based post permalink structures, you can manipulate the date structure directly:

function wpa57228_date_structure() {
    global $wp_rewrite;
    $wp_rewrite->date_structure = $wp_rewrite->front . 'date/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%';
}
add_action( 'init', 'wpa57228_date_structure' );