I wanted to create a new WordPress page that is actually a link to another site. The goal is to have the page show up in a list of my pages, but actually send the web user to t
There is a much simpler way in wordpress to create a redirection by using wordpress plugins. So here i found a better way through the plugin Redirection and also you can find other as well on this site Create Url redirect in wordpress through Plugin
(This is for posts, not pages - the principle is same. The permalink hook is different by exact use case)
I just had the same issue and created a more convenient way to do that - where you don't have to re-edit your functions.php
all the time, or fiddle around with your server settings on each addition (I do not like both).
TLTR
You can add a filter on the actual WP permalink function you need (for me it was post_link
, because I needed that page alias in an archive/category list), and dynamically read the referenced ID from the alias post itself.
This is ok, because the post is an alias, so you won't need the content anyways.
First step is to open the alias post and put the ID of the referenced post as content (and nothing else):
Next, open your functions.php
and add:
function prefix_filter_post_permalink($url, $post) {
// if the content of the post to get the permalink for is just a number...
if (is_numeric($post->post_content)) {
// instead, return the permalink for the post that has this ID
return get_the_permalink((int)$post->post_content);
}
return $url;
}
add_filter('post_link', 'prefix_filter_post_permalink', 10, 2 );
That's it
Now, each time you need to create an alias post, just put the ID of the referenced post as the content, and you're done.
This will just change the permalink. Title, excerpt and so on will be shown as-is, which is usually desired. More tweaking to your needs is on you, also, the "is it a number" part in the PHP
code is far from ideal, but like this for making the point readable.
I'm not familiar with Wordpress templates, but I'm assuming that headers are sent to the browser by WP before your template is even loaded. Because of that, the common redirection method of:
header("Location: new_url");
won't work. Unless there's a way to force sending headers through a template before WP does anything, you'll need to use some Javascript like so:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
document.location = "new_url";
</script>
Put that in the section and it'll be run when the page loads. This method won't be instant, and it also won't work for people with Javascript disabled.
I've found that these problems are often best solved at the server layer. Do you have access to an .htaccess file where you could place a redirect rule? If so:
RedirectPermanent /path/to/page http://uri.com
This redirect will also serve a "301 Moved Permanently" response to indicate that the Flickr page (for example) is the permanent URI for the old page.
If this is not possible, you can create a custom page template for each page in question, and add the following PHP code to the top of the page template (actually, this is all you need in the template:
header('Location: http://uri.com, true, 301');
More information about PHP headers.
Alternately, use a filter.
Create an empty page in your WordPress blog, named appropriately to what you need it to be. Take note of the post_id. Then create a filter that alters its permalink.
add_filter('get_the_permalink','my_permalink_redirect');
function my_permalink_redirect($permalink) {
global $post;
if ($post->ID == your_post_id_here) {
$permalink = 'http://new-url.com/pagename';
}
return $permalink;
}
This way the url will show up correctly in the page no funny redirects are required.
If you need to do this a lot, then think about using the custom postmeta fields to define a postmeta value for "offsite_url" or something like that, then you can create pages as needed, enter the "offsite_url" value and then use a filter like the one above to instead of checking the post_id you check to see if it has the postmeta required and alter the permalink as needed.
I found a plugin that helped me do this within seconds without editing code:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-pagepost-redirect-plugin/
I found it here: http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-link-title-external-url/