Duplicate category slugs desperately needed – will this EVER be fixed?

  • Long story short, WordPress has a monumental issue forbidding you to use the same category slug more than once. It disallows you from having a category tree like this:

    Cars
    -Honda (mysite.com/cars/honda)
    -Toyota (mysite.com/cars/toyota)

    Trucks
    -Honda (mysite.com/trucks/honda)
    -Toyota (mysite.com/trucks/toyota)

    The system doesn’t allow that same category to exist amongst both product types, so you are forced with this inconceivably bad structure instead:

    Cars
    -Honda (mysite.com/cars/honda)
    -Toyota (mysite.com/cars/toyota)

    Trucks
    -Honda (mysite.com/trucks/honda-2)
    -Toyota (mysite.com/trucks/toyota-2)

    …where the “-2” is forced to be appended to the second set of categories, even though they have nothing to do with the previous ones as seen in “/cars/”. What this does is make WordPress a mute point when creating either a multi-country site (mysite.com/us/ and mysite.com/canada/, where both have duplicate site-wide category structures that are canonized) and classifieds or ecommerce sites, where the webmaster is forced to put a “-2” or reword/add unnecessary words to a category slug just to appease the restriction that WordPress’ core puts forth.

    I’ve been using WordPress for about 7 years, and this has not only never been fixed, but it never seems to be officially addressed or recognized. It’s just very discouraging, especially when you’re working on a huge project using WordPress, and suddenly get roadblocked because the software doesn’t allow you to perform the most fundamental action of having two identically named subcategories.

    Having a storefront that looks like this simply doesn’t cut it:

    mysite.com/new-cars/honda/accord/product-listing-here
    mysite.com/used-cars/honda-2/accord-2/product-listing-here
    nor does mysite.com/used-cars/used-honda/used-accord/product-listing-here, or any other reiteration or work-around involving the re-structuring of those URLs.

    …and I think anyone would agree with that.

    Really hoping this gets addressed as it is a major ongoing problem and there are numerous complaints about this on the forum over the past several years. Only a core update will fix this, so, only the dev team has the power to do anything about it.

    Thanks for your attention and for understanding my frustration.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Great idea… THanks for sharing.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    You could actually do that with Custom Post types (one for new cars, one for used) and share the tags/categories between. Then when you call the archive page and loop for each.

    That said, it’s partly an argument of the ‘right’ way to categorize things, and there isn’t one correct answer.

    In my site, I just tried it and cuplicate child category slug converted to car-hodna (instead of car-2) so you can have like this…

    honda
    -car
    -bike

    hero
    -car-hero
    -bike-hero

    Which is more seo friendly…

    Thread Starter pixelrage

    (@pixelrage)

    Ipstenu: Thanks for acknowledging this post. That does sound a bit complicated, especially for a non-scripting designer. The other fear that most people have with various measures/plugins that attempt to “override the system” and force WordPress to use duplicate slugs, is that it tends to either do a huge amount of database damage right away (especially if you are using a WordPress theme, such as a classifieds theme that already re-writes URLs in order to function), or in the long-run when WordPress comes out with a new version. The latter of which is the biggest issue – modifying a core issue, fostering a big site that has great search rankings & visits, then the site breaks at some point in the future.

    Even if WordPress gave you an option to use a duplicate slug with the understanding that it would restrict other things from happening – just the option of being able to do this would be so appreciated.

    Mindstein Tech: That 2nd example:

    Hero
    –Car-Hero
    –Bike-Hero

    …is exactly the kind of thing that would be seen as keyword spamming by the Google Penguin algorithm, plus it simply looks fishy. Overall, this practice of having to shoe-horn an additional word in each fragment of the URL is something we are subjected to doing in order to get past the “no duplicate slug” issue. This is why the current permalink issue needs to be fixed.

    Officially the only way is to reorganise your categories, the other solution is a paid extension that we use. It is at that point you need too decide on time vs cost, last time we mentioned it to fix the same problem the post was quoted as “Sorry, but this is not an answer”, shame the moderators do not take business needs in to account with a fundamental problem in the base platform but there you go.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    @serpyre, the moderators of the www.remarpro.com forums are not necessarily the developers of the www.remarpro.com software.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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