Optional /blog/ on multisite installations

[djio]

I hate /blog/ mandatory prefix in multisite installations

As far as I can see this was an arbitrary addition to the 3.1 version.
I couldn't find a single ticket (Trac) or suggestion (Ideas) about this.

Fact is I use WP for several companies as a CMS solution.
Unfortunately some of the companies use proxy blockers to filter employees access to the web. Now guess what is one of the most popular words they commonly block... BLOG !!

So the employees can't access blogspot and so, but they can't also access their own company's posts because of the infamous mandatory /blog/ prefix

My idea for a solution is to set this "compatibility mode to avoid conflicts" as an option in the main settings page. In addition the word 'blog' should be optional too, if I prefer 'news' instead (or any other), there would be no problem with proxies, blockers, etc.

As a conclusion, each scenario is different, we cannot impose a (commonly blocked) word as a mandatory prefix if we want to keep growing in the professional market.

[nacin]

Allow me first to reply to the pontificating that the word "blog" is "commonly blocked" in any reasonable situation. I wasn't aware that you could even navigate the internet without stumbling across that word. So allow me to chuckle for a moment on that this company considers itself to be in the "professional market." :-)

That said:

/blog/ is enforced in subdirectory situations, and has been since the days of MU. This is to prevent link collisions from occurring between names of sites and the first piece of a permalink on the main site. The subsite would win, per how MU is loaded, even though the main site should probably win (given that the main site is official, while sub-sites may be registered).

Until we have global permalink collision detection, we're stuck with the current solution.

That said, you're welcome to override it by manually editing the permalink structure on the main site. You can remove it or change it to /news/ without worry.

[kawauso]

Duplicate: #12002

Patch will follow to allow filtering and proper display on the Permalinks screen once I iron out the issues raised there.

[djio]

Just to pont a real life situation:
Where I come from, and I mean Brazil, major companies block some words like hot, sex, porn, fuck, and also blog to avoid waste of employees labor time with "minor distractions". I don't mean creative or development companies, but any other market or industry.
It's sad but true. And I encounter myself in the position of a long-time developer facing this same problem over and over: when I offer Multisite solutions using WP to my clients I must always ask how is their proxy/firewall policy agains the 'blog' word, and most of the time people won't change the policy so I must find another solution. I believe that in this case hardcoding a solution will never be a solution, because I'll lose it in next WP update.

Thanks Nacin for the clarification o the MU heritage. I really spent some hours and a few weeks looking in the Track for a single /blog mention and I didn't have any luck. I didn't mean to duplicate an issue. I'm moving this discussion to the original #12002 ticket.

[djio]

By the way, I already done that, removing the /blog/ completely in the code but my website just ignores it, please check
​www.djio.com.br in the categories sidebar widget: every category has a /blog/ prefix and it doesn't work if a manually remove the prefix i the URL.

Any idea how to solve this in the long run?

[kawauso]

You'd need to remove the /blog/ slug from the actual permalink structure in the database, rather than the code.