Monthly Archives: August 2013

Prefixing a Custom Taxonomy in WordPress

web design,

I’m currently working on a website with a custom portfolio section. It’s making use of a custom post type called project and two attached custom taxonomies called market, and service. The portfolio page exists here:

example.com/portfolio/

displaying all the projects. Each project live here:

example.com/projects/<project-slug>

Everything was going fine until I realized that my custom taxonomies were not as separated from the main blog as I would like them to be. Consider the following taxonomy archive URLs:

example.com/market/<market-slug>
example.com/service/<service-slug>

and the very similar pages already on the site:

example.com/services/
example.com/services/service1
example.com/services/service2

etc. What I needed to do was to group the taxonomy archives under the portfolio page in the URL structure, turning

example.com/market/<market-slug>

into

example.com/portfolio/market/<market-slug>

But how does one prefix a custom taxonomy URL in WordPress with a static value such as ‘/portfolio/‘ ? The answer is pretty easy, it turns out.

Put That Slash in the Slug

All you need to do is add the static prefix value to the slug portion of the rewrite argument when registering the taxonomy. For example:

$serviceArgs = array(
		'labels'     => $serviceLabels,
		'query_var'  => 'service',
		'rewrite'    => array( 'slug' => 'portfolio/service' ) //was 'service'
	);
	register_taxonomy( 'project_service', null, $serviceArgs );

After you make the update, flush your rewrite rules and you are good to go!

More info on register_taxonomy().

Restoring a single WordPress site to a Network

web design, ,

I’ve been attempting to move my localhost development copy of a WordPress environment to a test site on a client’s server. When talking it over with the team, we decided that the test site should be a WordPress network with one site for testing, and one site for production. This will allow for a much more manageable environment in the future, but presents an initial problem.

The Problem

I want to do a database transfer from my localhost WordPress install to a web server running a WordPress network. However, I can’t blindly drop the DB and import my own because multiple options are set differently and there are extra tables in the network DB. I would use an export / import with the XML file, but that wouldn’t be able to download my media files, not to mention the plugin configuration & widget settings.

7 of 9 from star trek: voyager
“Insufficient”

After mulling it over a bit, the easy solution hit me.

The Solution

Why not first restore my localhost WordPress DB to a single install on a web server, then use the export / import XML on the network! I’m still out the plugin settings, but at least my media files can be downloaded. For this particular project, the site had hundreds of media files and 1 plugin, so I figured that option was close enough. Here are the steps I took in list form:

  1. Export localhost DB
  2. Install a single (non-network) WordPress on a web server
  3. FTP plugins, themes, and uploads to the single site
  4. Drop / Import the localhost DB to the single site
  5. Edit the DB to replace all URLs as appropriate -> eg change all “localhost:1337/dev” instances to “example.com” (I like this tool)
  6. Create the export XML from the single site ->Dashboard > Tools > Export
  7. Import the file to the appropriate site on the network, selecting to download file attachments after the upload
    wordpress import media files
  8. All done. Yay!