Regenerate Slugs From Title of Posts

5 comments

1. Yes, it is possible.

   Sample code, has to be tested and refined:

   // get all posts
   $posts = get_posts( array (  'numberposts' => -1 ) );
   
   foreach ( $posts as $post )
   {
       // check the slug and run an update if necessary 
       $new_slug = sanitize_title( $post->post_title );
       if ( $post->post_name != $new_slug )
       {
           wp_update_post(
               array (
                   'ID'        => $post->ID,
                   'post_name' => $new_slug
               )
           );
       }
   }
   

   I just made this up, there are probably some errors and egde cases, but it should give you an idea. Also, this may take a while, so it could be useful to split the update into smaller chunks.

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2. This plugin also does the job: http://www.jerrytravis.com/598/wordpress-plugin-to-generate-post-slugs

   However, as it only does it for posts which don’t have a slug yet, if you need to regenerate slugs edit the following line in the plugin:

   if ($post->post_name == "") {

   for example, you could change it to:

   if (true) {

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3. I was trying the method suggested by Toscho, which is the “instinctive one”, but in many cases it doesn’t work (cf the core code to get what I mean by “many cases”).

   Looking in the code, I found the wp_insert_post_data filter hook, called by the wp_update_post function right before inserting the post iunto the database.

   By calling this filter, and changing the value of $data['post_name'], I was able to get this to work properly. WordPress is cool but so badly documented…

   I edited the documentation, so that more people can find this workaround if needed.

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4. you can do this directly in mysql if you need. (our woocommerce site has 100’s of thousands of products):

   update wp_posts set post_name = concat(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(lower(post_title), '"', ''), "'", ''), ",", '-'), " ", '-'), "&", ''), ";", ''), "@", ''), ".", ''), ":", ''), "/", ''), "+", ''), "(", ''), ")", ''), "--", '-'), "---", '-'), "--", '-'), "--", '-'), '-', id) where post_type = 'product';
   

   where post_type = ‘product’ – that will keep your update to just woocommerce products; you should figure out what limits you want to keep on this query.

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5. We had an issue where we migrating and combined a bunch of post types. We had a bunch of blank titles as well. I wrote a WP CLI command to fix them all, but here is the gist of what I did:

       global $wpdb;
       $types = [
         'page',
         // Your CPT machine names
       ];
   
       // Formats our IN query properly.
       $final = array_map(function($type) {
         return "'" . esc_sql($type) . "'";
       }, $types);
   
       // Grabs all our empty title fields.
       $query = sprintf("SELECT post_title, ID FROM `%s` WHERE post_type IN (%s) AND post_name = ''",
         $wpdb->posts,
         implode(",", $final)
       );
   
       foreach ($wpdb->get_results($query) as $post) {
         $title = sanitize_title_with_dashes( $post->post_title );
         $wpdb->update('wp_posts', ['post_name' => $title], ['ID' => $post->ID]);
       }
   

   Needed to do a direct MySQL update since wp_update_post doesn’t update the post_name.

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