[theme-reviewers] $post->guid Issues in Some Repository Themes

[Mike Little]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 20:53, Simon Prosser <pross at pross.org.uk> wrote:

> I got a tweet from Chip asking for theme-check to flag it as bad, so ..
>
> Are people not supposed to use it at all? if so theme fails? and if so what
> is the suggested alternative?
>
>
You should *never*, *ever* use the guid in your theme. It is (meant to be) a
globally unique identifier for RSS readers.

RSS readers use the GUID to know which posts are newly published, so they
don't retrieve the same content over and over.

It is not a permalink (even though it looks like one) and could just as well
be a random string of hexadecimal characters. In fact that's one of the
current suggestions on how to make sure they really are unique: due to
inconsistencies in behaviour over the years the current ones are not
necessarily unique, and of course people change them all the time -- *holds
up guilty hand*.

So any code that references or outputs the guid is "doing it wrong"

Mike

-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/
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