Using Wordpress Post Slug (Now part of permalinks)
A few days ago I was tryng to install rs-discuss, its a wordpress Forum plugin. After installing the plugin and while setting it up, under Manage > Forum > Configuration options I saw the following line -
“Check your settings under Forum › Configuration. The “forum” page slug should be set to the same name you see listed under “Post slug” when you edit this page.
I was not familiar with the term “post slug” reason being I was using an ASP.NET blog called dasBlog before I started using wordpress and I started using wordpress from version 2.6.1 onwards.
After checking on the internet I found that post slug is the page name used in the permalinks when we write the post. In the older versions of wordpress there was a keyword value pair called post slug that you can use to set the URL of the post. That is exactly what rs-discuss configuration was talking about.
e.g. This is my recent word press post -
If you notice the post slug that is picked by wordpress by default is the title of the blog which is
Top 5 (five) Web Hosting Plans – Linux Web Hosting (PHP PERL MySql Apache Wordpress Blog Hosting)
which if converted by wordpress to make it URL standards compatible will look like following:
top-5-five-web-hosting-plans-%e2%80%93-linux-web-hosting-php-perl-mysql-apache-wordpress-blog-hosting
Now there might be times when some of the terms in your title are not important for search engines or might make the URL of the post very long. In that case you can change the post slug to show a URL which is shorter and easier to remember. Permalinks or post slug does not need to match the title of the post and can be set to any text you or your users might find useful.
In the recent versions of wordpress post slug is a part of the permalinks and can be set using the permalinks edit mode right under the title. And permalinks EDIT will only show up once the post is saved or auto saved by wordpress.
Edit wordpress page slug screenshot
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