While working on the new URL structure project…

While working on the new URL structure project for WordCamp.org, we’ve stumbled upon an interesting thing and would love to hear your feedback.

The problem is that the majority of WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. sites use the /year/month/day/post-slug/ permalinks structure, so when converting year.city.wordcamp.org to city.wordcamp.org/year we essentially end up with a /year/year/ as part of the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org, which looks like something’s broken. Here’s an example:

http://russia.wordcamp.org/2014/2014/08/04/one-week-out/

We thought of three different solutions to this problem.

1. The simplest solution is to leave it like that.

2. Change the permalinks structure to /month/day/post-slug/ so the above URL would look like this:

http://russia.wordcamp.org/2014/08/04/one-week-out/

Fairly simple, and coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. gives us redirects for free, however, there’s a gotcha. The year in the URL is part of the site URL and not the post permalink, so when we announce the next WordCamp in Russia on the 2014 event site in January 2015 (for example), the URL will still say 2014:

http://russia.wordcamp.org/2014/01/15/wordcamp-2015-announcement/

So by looking at the URL one may think the post was published in January 2014. This affects all WordCamps that published announcement posts for new events on older sites. And even more it affects WordCamps happening early in the year, because they will likely have quite a few posts in November and December.

Also worth noting that links to the old subdomain-based sites may end up with a double redirect.

3. Change the permalinks structure to /post-slug/ so our URL would look like this:

http://russia.wordcamp.org/2014/one-week-out/

This solution requires more work, since core will not automatically handle redirects for us. Just like solution #2 it will likely introduce double redirects for old subdomain-based URLs.

All of this affects only existing WordCamp sites. Going forward, we’d like to switch all new WordCamps to use the /post-name/ permalink structure by default.

Thoughts? Comments? Any other ideas?

#wordcamp-org, #wordcamps