The question:
I’d like to develop a plugin that allows me to have custom user pages. I really like the way the author archive template handles the URL: /author/username. I don’t want to rewrite the author_base
as I’d like to keep that functionality in place untouched.
I’d like to replicate that clean URL layout in my plugin, so that when a user goes to /users/username it will go to my custom template. I’d like to know if anyone has examples of how to properly parse the username from the URL so that I can lookup the user’s data from the plugin and display my template.
The Solutions:
Below are the methods you can try. The first solution is probably the best. Try others if the first one doesn’t work. Senior developers aren’t just copying/pasting – they read the methods carefully & apply them wisely to each case.
Method 1
I found the answer to this from @bybloggers answer found here. https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/58793/12920
I modified his code very slightly to tailor it to my needs, but this is the code that worked for me and was exactly what I was looking for:
// Create the query var so that WP catches the custom /member/username url
function userpage_rewrite_add_var( $vars ) {
$vars[] = 'member';
return $vars;
}
add_filter( 'query_vars', 'userpage_rewrite_add_var' );
// Create the rewrites
function userpage_rewrite_rule() {
add_rewrite_tag( '%member%', '([^&]+)' );
add_rewrite_rule(
'^member/([^/]*)/?',
'index.php?member=$matches[1]',
'top'
);
}
add_action('init','userpage_rewrite_rule');
// Catch the URL and redirect it to a template file
function userpage_rewrite_catch() {
global $wp_query;
if ( array_key_exists( 'member', $wp_query->query_vars ) ) {
include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/user-profile.php');
exit;
}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'userpage_rewrite_catch' );
After this was in my functions.php
file, I had to re-save my Permalinks.
Sometimes re-saving the permalinks didn’t finish the job 100% and browsing to www.mysite.com/member/username would 404, so I had to manually flush the rules by putting this into my functions.php
and loading my site once. Then removing it so I don’t run it every time the site loads, since that’s unnecessary overhead.
// Code needed to finish the member page setup
function memberpage_rewrite() {
global $wp_rewrite;
$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
add_action('init','memberpage_rewrite');
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0