Creating SEO friendly URL's in WP

[Whitey]

In the past creating keyword friendly URL's for large sites has been a piece of cake in other CMS's.

Typically, a base URL would be set in a template of each category, and wildcard entries would be inserted into the URL to create the variant.

e.g.

/green-house-in-[%city%]-[%country_of_category%]/

Can it be that easy in WP? How are URL's formed in WP?

I'm having trouble with our developers and not really understanding what the issues are. They are saying they will have to rebuild from scratch if we want to vary what they have produced.

[lorax]

Whitey,
WordPress doesn't support that level of customization of the URLs out of the box. You can probably use a plugin to accomplish this or the developers can customize the theme to accommodate it but it's not easy. Content in a WordPress framework does quite well with Google when left alone but if you really want to purse the URLs, then I suggest you take a look at Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.

[martinibuster]

Maybe this, about Pretty Permalinks [codex.wordpress.org], will help. You can create "categories" which will function like HTML directories, then indicate that in the Permalink section that you want your URLs to be /category/whatever-you-want. Then there are plugins like this one [wordpress.org] that can help you create URLs that match your current HTML extensions. I think there's a way to do it without a plugin, but I'm not 100% sure. I'm better at HTML and PHP than screwing around with WP. I try to figure out how to do things without a plugin if I can because plugins can break your site during updates or be the source of a hack.

[webtechnocrazy]

you can use htaccess