[wp-hackers] Why always absolute paths?

[Otto]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:48 AM, Vinicius Massuchetto
<viniciusandre at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Japh <japhie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The issue of broken absolute URLs left over after a migration is actually
>> fairly easily fixed with a MySQL find/replace query.  Not really an issue.
>
> Serialized data in plugins and Wordpress configuration won't be fixed
> by a search/replace. And doing that sounds logic for who knows what
> SQL is. Users will be stuck on this.
>
> While working with the XML migration, users won't think about opening
> the file to replace the links too. We expect a migration to be truly a
> complete migration.

Surprisingly enough, this isn't often an issue. Plugins should
generally be smart enough to not save whole URIs in serialized data,
and even when they do, it's generally only a single entry that is
easily fixed by simply reconfiguring the plugin when moving the site.

The main issue with absolute URIs is in the post content itself.
Things like broken images and that. And those are easily fixed with a
search/replace method.

As far as "users" goes, there's several plugins that make this much
easier to do. No "SQL" needed. This is the one I use:
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/search-regex

-Otto