While developing Foliopress Testimonials (sorry, no link at this time, since it’s still in alpha version), I wanted to create a full and easily editable testimonials system, with categories and stuff.
Looking into the issue more I wanted to create own page with testimonials, then even whole structure of pages with different URL for each category. Not realising then all the obstacles (in the end it’s not the best solution at all) I started working and immediately ran into problems. First of all, documentation on how WP handles creation of imaginary pages with own URL is very weak. I had to go to source code, poke around the internet to actually do it.
When finally done (lots of work and it was not done for the first time, mainly due to lack of documentation) the system was just not working properly. Testimonials were not in sitemap, since we use external plugin, you’ll not find any mention of this page in WordPress administration. These are the main problems, but there are more.
Seeing how that went, I remade the structure to check within posts and pages and search for special text (we in Foliovision use standard "special text" like ["name of plugin" "options"]). This took only a small portion of time and actually works really well. WP can see the page, so any sitemap generator does as well, testimonials can be inserted into any page (with different URL) with as many options as you like. The system for assigning URL is then independent from Foliopress Testimonials structure and that way easily configurable.
The lesson to learn from this is, that staying within WordPress and playing by it’s rules just pays off.
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