Comments on: Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin 0.5

By: Drew Vogel

Drew Vogel — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:59:42 +0000

Thanks in advance!

By: Drew Vogel

Drew Vogel — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:58:33 +0000

I am having a very strange problem with my established WordPress (2.0.4) installation at http://www.drewvogel.com. If I go to Options>Permalinks, my permalinks stop working (even if I don’t click “Update Permalink Settings”). Simply viewing the Permalink settings page is enough to break it. This is 100% reproducable. The server is a Fedora Core 5 server with all the latest patches.

Can anyone help me to fix this problem?

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:19:55 +0000

works

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:19:39 +0000

It work perfectly, many thanks

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:19:23 +0000

Thanks, i will try that a.s.p.

By: Scott Yang

Scott Yang — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:27:20 +0000

I have had a look at the code, and have guessed that the issue is with how WordPress handles 404 response.

With permalink-redirect plugin enabled, it automatically redirect any author request to the author’s “permalink”, i.e.

GET /?author_name=foobar

will raise a “301 Moved Permanently” to

GET /author/foobar/

However, in WordPress (2.0.3 at least) wp-includes/classes.php WP::handle_404() function, if the post count is 0, it will send back “404 Not Found” message, UNLESS there is a query string.

Therefore, while /?author_name=foobar gets a 200, /author/foobar/ gets a 404, even though foobar is a valid author but without any post.

I think it is more a WordPress issue than a Permalink-Redirect issue. The same applies to category archive — a category without any post will get a 404 if you access its permalink.

You can, however, by-pass redirecting from query-string URI to permalink URI for author profile pages, if post count equals 0. Open ylsy_permalink_redirect.php, and around line 94 (for version 0.5.3):

       $author = get_userdata(get_query_var('author'));
-      if ($author === false)
+      if ($author === false || count($posts) == 0)
           return false;

It will then not redirecting for author profiles if author does not have any post.

I’ll put in this hack in the next permalink-redirect plugin, but I do see this as a problem of WordPress’ way of handling 404.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:55:14 +0000

The problem is also discussed here:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/64766?replies=4#post-397299

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:54:03 +0000

Yes it works without the plugin, that is the whole problem :-)

I personally do not mind if there is an exception for the author pages = no permalink structure for these pages. But I haven’t got a clue how to write an exception.

By: Scott Yang

Scott Yang — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:37:31 +0000

Vincent,

Check whether it works *without* the plugin.

From what I have seen, it is redirecting to the right URL, but because of the way WordPress’ “the loop” works, if there is no article in archive (for that category, author, date, etc), it will produce a 404 on that page.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:59:55 +0000

The author page is still not working. it only displays author pages when the author has written a post. But not a author page of someone who has only registered of responded to post

for example on these pages:

http://www.ochblog.com/members/

and

http://www.bangkoktalk.nl/alle-leden/

I am using your version 0.5.3