"Permalink" URLs

I used Wordpress for a while but soon thought that if I wanted to get any better at web development, I'd stop using other people's portals. I've been studying the framework of Wordpress but I still can't grasp one concept: permalinks. I noticed that, with the right settings, a Wordpress-powered article might have a URL with the extention "/2005/03/04/today-is-march-fourth" and that would be the permalink, but when you look in the FTP, there are no folders as such.

I'm fairly sure you can do this in PHP, since WP is coded in it, but I haven't figured out how yet. I am willing to accept emails, if it would be easier to explain that way.

Thanks,
Steve

What is wordpress? A CMS system or something? There is no such thing as a 'permalink' - what you posted up there looks like a relative path, and could be relative to anything, or even an obscure database reference.

Wordpress is a cms, and they refer to the URL of a certain post as a "permalink." I do not know why.

I'm not sure what a relative path is. Do I need to do URL masking? What I'm trying to do is avoid a URL like http://www.noenemies.com/journal/viewpost.php?id=5 and replace it with something like http://www.noenemies.com/journal/2005/03/03/yay-its-friday/ I'm not sure exactly what method I should use to do this without hardcoding everything.

Perhaps my initial post was not clear enough? I hope you understand now.

relative path: a path that is relative to the current directory
hard coded path: www.noenemies.com/journal/2005/03/03/yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: journal/2005/03/03/yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: 2005/03/03/yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: 03/03/yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: 03/yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: yay-its-friday/page.htm
relative path: page.htm

You can faff around with Apache settings and have something like "http://www.yoursite.com/journal/2005/03/03/yay/page.htm" be converted on-the-fly (internally by Apache) to "http://www.yoursite.com/journal.php?2005#03#03#yay".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink

There is sucjh a thing as a permalink. A permalink is a non destructive link, a link that does not get removed. The theory is that you can change cms and keep all your links intact using the same permalink structure (switch from Wordpress to Movabletype for example)

It's really very simple to do actually.

The permalink stucture is stored in the .htaccess
file and converts the url to a query pointing at the index.php file.

This means 2005/03/03/ would become index.php?p=2005/03/03/

Personally I would (and do) stick with wordpress. I've made a number of cms's for different things and it's really not worth the time and effort when you have something as powerful as wordpress at hand.

I'm a SubDreamer fan myself, though I have to admit to not using WordPress very much (just a quick test a while back).

SubDreamer Light (the free version) is available at http://www.subdreamer.com/light/

Well, I would stick with Wordpress, but it's not behaving right. I keep all the WP files in "/journal/" but I need an excerpt from the most recent post on the front page. I tried getting it directly from the database, but it goes through all this meta stuff, deciding how many comments it should have, and what category it is, and I can't figure out how to extract all that from the database directly.

Also, any opinions on Movable Type?

I suppose I'll stick with Wordpress for the journal, and use my cms for the other pages, like my portfolio, etc.

The "pretty urls" or "permalink" require mod-rewrite for apache, I believe there is a windows IIS addon to do this as well.

Looked up mod_rewrite and I think I might be able to work with it, although I have no experience with Apache, but I'll figure it out. Although I installed Wordpress and it had pretty URLs without mod_rewrite installed. Odd.