Community pages return a 404 after changing the base slug

Marco Silva Marco Silva 3 months ago Resolved

I changed the base slug from community to forum and now every community page 404s. The settings saved correctly.

I suspect rewrite rules — what's the right way to regenerate them?

1

This deserves more votes. It is a small change with an outsized impact on day-to-day use.

For what it is worth, the same approach works with the PMPro adapter — the membership side is identical from here.

One caveat for larger communities: keep an eye on the indexes. At a few thousand rows the difference is night and day.

Great point. I had not considered the angle you raised in the second paragraph — it reframes the whole thing for me.

Following this thread closely. We are about to face the exact same decision and the replies here are gold.

This deserves more votes. It is a small change with an outsized impact on day-to-day use.

We ran into the same situation last quarter. What worked for us was starting small and only adding complexity when a real need showed up.

Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it — the kind of thing I will want to reference again in a month.

This is the answer I wish I had found six months ago. Would have saved me a weekend of trial and error.

I respectfully disagree on one detail. In my setup the opposite held true, though I suspect it comes down to community size.

Great point. I had not considered the angle you raised in the second paragraph — it reframes the whole thing for me.

Tried this on a staging copy first and it behaved exactly as described. Confident enough to roll it to production now.

One caveat for larger communities: keep an eye on the indexes. At a few thousand rows the difference is night and day.

We ran into the same situation last quarter. What worked for us was starting small and only adding complexity when a real need showed up.

This deserves more votes. It is a small change with an outsized impact on day-to-day use.

This deserves more votes. It is a small change with an outsized impact on day-to-day use.

Could you say more about how you measured the result? I want to try this but I am not sure what success would look like.

This matches my experience exactly. The hard part is staying consistent once the initial novelty wears off.

This is the answer I wish I had found six months ago. Would have saved me a weekend of trial and error.

Following this thread closely. We are about to face the exact same decision and the replies here are gold.

Great point. I had not considered the angle you raised in the second paragraph — it reframes the whole thing for me.

This matches my experience exactly. The hard part is staying consistent once the initial novelty wears off.

Could you say more about how you measured the result? I want to try this but I am not sure what success would look like.

Run wp jetonomy flush-rules (or visit Settings > Permalinks and save) after changing the base slug. The 404s are stale rewrite rules — regenerating them fixes it immediately.

Tried this on a staging copy first and it behaved exactly as described. Confident enough to roll it to production now.