Wordpress - Need help with friendly URL's in Wordpress

I don't know (or didn't know) much about the rewrite rules myself (but it seems nobody does), but based on some other answers here, I got this to work. We add a new rewrite rule that matches designers/designer_name/. We "flush" the rewrite rules so they get saved to the database, but make sure to do this only once, since it is an expensive operation. Now, we set up a pattern that will match our page and save the extra part in the designer_name query variable. Since WordPress does not know it must look at this variable, we hook into the query_vars filter and tell it to look at that too.

Now, in the page-designers.php theme file, we can do get_query_var('designer_name') and it will give you the designer name. If you want extra stuff like paging (designer/designer_name/page/2), you need to add an extra rewrite rule for that (or feeds, or whatever that starts with designer/designer_name). But the basic stuff should work.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: WPA 3537
Plugin URI: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/3537/need-help-with-friendly-urls-in-wordpress
Description: Need help with friendly URL's in Wordpress
Version: 1.0
Author: Jan Fabry
*/

register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'wpa3537_flush_rules');
function wpa3537_flush_rules()
{
    add_rewrite_rule('designers/([^/]+)', 'index.php?pagename=designers&designer_name=$matches[1]', 'top');
    flush_rewrite_rules(false);
}

add_filter('query_vars', 'wpa3537_query_vars');
function wpa3537_query_vars($query_vars)
{
    $query_vars[] = 'designer_name';
    return $query_vars;
}

First I have a question: How are you getting URLs that look like the following?

http://www.example.com/designers/?id=43&name=designer+name

Those are not standard URLs for WordPress; is that the way you envision is should work, or does your site actually work that way? And if so, how did those URLs come to be? Is it a highly customized site? Who customized it; you, or someone else?

About .htaccess

That said, we'll start with .htaccess to get that out of the way. Yours is identical to practically every other WordPress installation's .htaccess file except for installs that 1.) serve off a URL subdirectory (and then the difference is trivial), 2.) have had people who don't understand how WordPress routes URLs mucking around them and/or 3.) except for those rare advanced installs that actually do need .htaccess mucking (and if you don't know why you would need to do it chance are almost 100% that you don't.)

About Leading Categories in WordPress URLs

Next, your desired URL format with category name in the first path segment is pattern that the WordPress community frowns upon for performance reasons, see this:

• Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful

Basically the problem is if you have more than a handful for "Pages" (i.e. $post->post_type=='page') then WordPress will compare every URL for every page load against the URL for every Page and that can slow down your system. That said, if you only have a handful of Pages and you don't have a high-traffic site, it's my opinion not to sweat it.

_{(source: mikeschinkel.com)}

Now on to your questions.

1.) Is there any point in changing the above URL regarding SEO

Yes. Cleaning up the URL improves your keyword densities. That said, in my opinion there's a lot more to SEO than just what the search engine sees and making your URLs friendlier will give people more confidence in them and make it more likely they will link to your site in blogs and share your links on Twitter, in Facebook and elsewhere. That creates two benefits; more links the search engines see and more exposure from the sharing.

Personally I like to think of it as how one dresses; if you are really messy then people are going to have a lower subconscious opinion of you than if you are meticulous. I think the same is true with URLs; if you have clean, user friendly URLs your house appears to be in order; if you have sloppy URLs your site will just not "feel" the same, again IMO. (Nasty URLs are one reason I loathe using LinkedIn. I think they'd have been more successful had they paid attention to the URLs like Twitter did, for example.)

2.) How can I get the "pretty" URL?

I think this article and/or this page on Codex should be able to help?

• Optimizing WordPress Permalinks

• Settings Permalinks SubPanel (on Codex)

Basically you need to set your Permalinks template and then save them. You might have to use FTP to change the permission settings on .htaccess before WordPress can save them for you. Hopefully this screenshot will be enough to illustrate what you need to do:

_{(source: mikeschinkel.com)}

Let me know if this answers your question and if not where you are stuck.

Other Permalink Answers

In addition there are lots of other answers to questions about Permalinks in WordPress here at WordPress Answers; some of these might be of help to you too, in no particular order:

• Setting up WordPress with Custom Permalinks and no .htaccess File?

• WordPress overrides the GET variables, (page_id) set in HTACCESS?

• Minimal custom permalink structure?

• Custom Post Type Rewrite Rule for Author & Paging?

• Creating 301 Redirects for Post, Page, Category and Image URLs?

• Force the Website URL to Include “www” and to be Upper Case?