How Do I Programmatically Force Custom Permalinks with My Theme?

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I’m making a custom theme. It’s a highly specialized theme to make WordPress into like an application rather than a CMS system or blog. For instance, a Dental Office Scheduling System (with CMS and widget capabilities), as an example.

Because my theme needs pretty URLs to work properly, something I really need is for the .htaccess file to be that default that gets created only when someone sets Permalinks to Custom (and then types in something like %postname%). How do I trigger that in WordPress, programmatically, so that it creates this? I mean, I could probably overwrite the file myself during theme activation, but the better thing would be to use the WordPress API for it.

3 Answers
3

To fully enable permalinks, you also need to ensure that .htaccess is also created. To do that, you need to set an option and flush the rules with a Boolean.

global $wp_rewrite; 

//Write the rule
$wp_rewrite->set_permalink_structure('/%postname%/'); 

//Set the option
update_option( "rewrite_rules", FALSE ); 

//Flush the rules and tell it to write htaccess
$wp_rewrite->flush_rules( true );

If you use this in a plugin, it needs to be in the init hook, not the load hook. If it’s in the load hook, it will throw an error saying $wp_rewrite is null.

Important: You should also have a conditional so this is only set once. (You can create an option and check if it’s set, if not then you run this permalink code and set that option)

I also typically check if it’s the admin side and only run it if it is.

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