[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #6481: Fancy permalinks should be enabled on new sites

[WordPress Trac]

#6481: Fancy permalinks should be enabled on new sites
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 Reporter:  Denis-de-Bernardy  |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement        |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal             |   Milestone:  4.2
Component:  Permalinks         |     Version:  2.7
 Severity:  normal             |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch          |     Focuses:
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Comment (by Denis-de-Bernardy):

 Replying to [comment:97 GaryJ]:
 > If I write an amazing post at `example.com/2010/foobar` but update it
 regularly, it sounds like you would not even click through to it if it
 were linked from somewhere else?

 Not "sounds like you would not even click." It's simply "will not click."
 Because depending on the type of information, I and other users who have
 been trained to discriminate information based on its author or age will
 go the extra mile to actually get this type of meta data before even
 bothering to read anything of non-trivial length.


 > Even if I turn that into a page, and point the 2010 post to it, any old
 link is still misdirecting about the content which is the important thing
 here.

 Google will show the newer url if you do the redirection properly. Old
 links won't, but that matters little because they'd be discussing your old
 information anyway.


 > While you're looking for the published date, it's the last modified date
 that, if present, is potentially more informative.

 It's not. If you're posting evergreen information in blog posts, I'm sorry
 to say but you're doing it wrong. Use static pages instead. And use blog
 posts (or better yet, your newsletter) to mention your new page and
 updates to it.


 > Take W3C specs as an example - there might be many revisions, and date-
 laden URLs, but the true or latest version can (nearly?) always be found
 at a URL without a date.

 It's not a blog post. It's a spec. It's draft versions (dated, or should
 be) vs evergreen content (non-dated).


 > As a counter example to not remembering or discovering URLs, take a URL
 that indicates a series: `example.com/foobar-part-1`. Even if there were
 no links to the later post, a curious visitor could make an educated guess
 where part 2 would be. With a URL like `example.com/2011/11/30/foobar-
 part-1`, it's simply not directly guessable.

 Then that's a UI/UX problem on your blog. If your foobar-part-1 post isn't
 linking to foobar-part-2 post and vice-versa, you need to revisit the
 navigation of your site's blog section or update your posts to work around
 its clunkiness. It has nothing to do with the url format.


 > As for drilling down through the date archives - sure, you couldn't do
 that with `%postname%`, but most WP themes display some sort of linked
 categorical taxonomy, irrespective of the URL, and that is arguably more
 useful than searching by date.

 And their UI/UX sucks. But that is another problem altogether, which has
 nothing to do with good url usability. The latter has three simple rules:

 1. The url should give good hints on what the page is about; and
 2. Some kind of date information (year/month or year/month/day) should be
 part of it if it's time sensitive.
 3. Some kind of author information should be part of it if it's author
 sensitive. (Think academics, not newspapers.)

 As noted by Justin, most blog posts fall under the time-sensitive rule, so
 using a date in the url is an excellent default.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6481#comment:98>
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