The plugin quite quickly evolved into a solution that allowed for keywords as well as descriptions to be added, as well as the ability to set a custom page title. If required the page title can even be defined in your page template, allowing for dynamic pages / templates to have specific titles.

Although unsure if anyone would actually be interested in using it, I decided to publish it to the Plugin Directory anyway. If anything it would allow me to manage the versions and easily update the handful of blogs that I have installed it on.

I actually thought that my second plugin, SubHeading would be more popular as there aren’t many existing solutions in the Directory for this. It’s not far behind in downloads, with just over 850 to date.

We all know that WordPress is a powerful and pretty impressive blogging platform, and contains many useful features. The problem is finding the features you need / want. Most of the time they are available – somewhere.

In this case, after a numbers of hours research, I’ve done all the hard work for you when it comes to adding custom rewrite rules. We shall assume we have a page called “directory‘” with the page ID “123” and the parent page of name “business“.

This page (ID: 123) looks for the parameter “business” and if is defined, displays the details for the corresponding company. We also want to add the location of the business in the url, but for simplicity we will not pass them through in this example.

The end goal is to have a list of businesses displayed on “/business/directory/” with links to the business details in the format “/business/directory/york-yo31/mybusinessltd/“.

To achieve this, we will need to make use of three hooks. The first is the “init” hook, which we will use to regenerate the rewrite rules and save them to the database using flush_rules().

function directory_flush_rewrite()
{
  global $wp_rewrite;
  $wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
add_action('init', 'directory_flush_rewrite');

The second hook is “query_vars“. This is required to add the string “business” to the list of query variables WordPress understands in order for it to be retrieved on our directory page.

function directory_vars($public_query_vars)
{
    $public_query_vars[] = 'business';
    return $public_query_vars;
}
add_filter('query_vars', 'directory_vars');

The last hook is called “generate_rewrite_rules” and allows us to add the custom rewrite rule/s the list of WordPress rewrite rules. Putting the three code snippets together will result in the following block of code, which should be added to your “functions.php” file.

function directory_flush_rewrite()
{
  global $wp_rewrite;
  $wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
add_action('init', 'directory_flush_rewrite');
function directory_vars($public_query_vars)
{
    $public_query_vars[] = 'business';
    return $public_query_vars;
}
add_filter('query_vars', 'directory_vars');
function directory_rewrite_rules($wp_rewrite)
{
	$wp_rewrite->rules = array(
		'business/directory/(?:\w+)-(?:\w+)/(.*)/?' => 'index.php?page_id=123&business='.$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)
	) + $wp_rewrite->rules;
}
add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'directory_rewrite_rules');

The final piece of information you need is how to access the variable passed through form the rewrite rule (“business=mybusinessltd”). This can be done using using the following:

$wp_query->get('business'); // returns 'mybusinessltd' in this example.

The example Reg Exp used could be modified and improved nad the page name could be matched and used instead of using the page id, but should put you on the right track. As mentioned earlier, you could also pass through the the other parameters (town & postcode) and use them alongside business in your lookup query.

This tool tells Google that it’s the same site, just a new domain. Unfortunately for me, they don’t recognise “.re.it” as a root level domain, so was unable to make use of this feature.

Instead I have to rely on a 301 redirect. If, like me, you’re using cPanel and have the old domain as a parked domain it will not issue a 301 header, however you can override this in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?sha.re.it$
RewriteRule ^.* "http\:\/\/36flavours\.com\/$0" [R=301,L]

Here we check to see if the domain is sha.re.it or www.sha.re.it and if so, redirect to http://36flavours.com with the 301 header.