Rewriting post slug before post save

2 comments

1. The following is to be taken more as a proof of concept rather than a copy/paste-ready solution.
   That being said, this is how you’d go about it:

   The save_post action runs whenever a post is updated or created. You can hook a callback function to it using add_action.

   Hence, your case would have to look something like this:

   // initial hook
   add_action( 'save_post', 'wpse105926_save_post_callback' );
   
   function wpse105926_save_post_callback( $post_id ) {
   
       // verify post is not a revision
       if ( ! wp_is_post_revision( $post_id ) ) {
   
           // unhook this function to prevent infinite looping
           remove_action( 'save_post', 'wpse105926_save_post_callback' );
   
           // update the post slug
           wp_update_post( array(
               'ID' => $post_id,
               'post_name' => 'some-new-slug' // do your thing here
           ));
   
           // re-hook this function
           add_action( 'save_post', 'wpse105926_save_post_callback' );
   
       }
   }
   

   What might be a bit confusing in the above is the un- and rehooking of the function from within it. This is required, since we call wp_update_post to update the slug, which in turn will trigger the save_post action to run again.

   As an aside, if you want WP to automatically generate the new slug based on the post title, simply pass an empty string:

   wp_update_post( array(
       'ID' => $post_id,
       'post_name' => '' // slug will be generated by WP based on post title
   ));
   

2. I needed the same except that only for post creation.

   I implemented the solution here (this one is copy/paste-ready 😉).

   Just remove the line which checks that both dates are equal, and it will update the slug for edit operations too. However, I do not recommend that since it will change the URL of the post and this is not good for SEO, among other things like broken links (404).

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