Pre-existing page with slug /embed/ does not work as described

[smerriman]

In #34971, embeds were added to static frontpages, and there was a discussion of how this would affect an existing page with a slug of /embed/.

The solution was:

• an existing page with slug /embed/ will work as is and disable the pretty embed URL
• new pages can't be created with a slug of /embed/.

However, this did not work properly. On a site of mine, there is a page with URL /embed/ that was working fine prior to this upgrade. Now:

• if you visit /embed/, you are redirected to the homepage.
• if you attempt to edit the page, the slug previews as /embed-2/, meaning editing the page content and saving has the unwanted side effect of forcing the URL to change and all links to the page to break without warning.

Suggested changes:

• fix whatever is incorrectly redirecting the URL
• allow a slug of /embed/ to continue to save as-is if it already exists.

[swissspidy]

Thanks for your report! I could reproduce this by manually changing a post's slug in the database (simulating an already existing post with that slug).

This means a visitor cannot access a post with that slug, which is of course a no-go.

[desrosj]

@swissspidy Do you still think this should be fixed? It's been quite a while, thinking it may not be safe to close as a wontfix.

At a broader scale, could maybe add a Site Health check that scans the database for potentially problematic post slugs (any that match rewrite rules for instance). But also not convinced that is a good idea.

[swissspidy]

While it still might be worth fixing (as #34971 did not fully resolve the issue apparently), 4 years with no additional reports on this make it sound like it's not really an urgent issue. So yeah, it can probably be closed as maybelater.

A Site Health check for embed post slugs seems interesting, but at that point I'd rather fix the bug for the user instead of having them fix their URLs.