[Domenic_S]

I have never had good luck with that. Some generated URLs still use the DB value and so forth. Perhaps it's an indictment of plugin developers vs WP core. I still cannot think of a good reason for that value to be in the DB at all.

[MichaelTieso]

I won't go into detail on that here but know that there's a very good reason for it. Plugin and theme developers should be using for example `esc_url( home_url( '/' ) );` when requiring the URL of the site.

[Domenic_S]

Ok, as someone who's battled with this... feature... of WP I am super curious as to the very good reason for storing the domain in the DB. Why couldn't links be relative (no need to know the domain), or set only as a sitewide variable in wp-config.php?

edit: and just discovered the 'guid' column on the posts table is hardcoded as the URL of the post -- the domain you're on at the time you create the content + the post ID. Seems like a nightmare for content staging on a non-prod environment.

[csixty4]

> just discovered the 'guid' column on the posts table is hardcoded as the URL of the post

It comes up every so often. The WordPress devs are well aware of the platform's warts & WTFs. People have talked for a while about replacing it with a proper UUID, but there are way too many themes & plugins that use the guid field to get the post's URL instead of calling, say, get_permalink( $post_id ).

So now the devs are stuck. You can deprecate "guid", but you can't get rid of it. You can't replace the URL with a UUID because of backwards compatibility with third-party code. Do you add a "uuid" column? Now you have a guid column & a uuid column and people are going to get even more confused.

Right now, content staging is a bit of an edge case and folks who need it are able to store a UUID in a post_meta field. So it's not a really critical issue. But it would definitely be nice to see a proper UUID in core.

Some relevant Trac tickets:

Guids No Longer Have Permalink Format (discusses changing the format) https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6492

Non-URL GUIDs are stripped on post update https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18395

[ereckers]

These are very old and well fought battles:

URLs delivered to the browser should be root-relative https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17048

WP Development & Production Sites http://lists.automattic.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2010-Novemb...

Relative vs. Absolute URLs stored in db http://lists.automattic.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2010-Decemb...

[deckiedan]

Because of this:

1) Users want to be able to update site-name (etc) from the admin interface.

2) We therefore need to store it somewhere.

3) We have a database!

The alternatives are:

- Storing in wp-config.php (which is also done...), but then it's not user-editable from the admin interface.

- Storing in a INI or JSON or similar document, which has only marginal if any benefits over storing in the database.

For deployment, since the location of the database values is fixed, you can set the variables with your deployment scripts.

[Domenic_S]

Certainly there are configuration options that are appropriate to store in the database, but I'm trying to understand why domain is one of them. The site knows what domain it is on by virtue of being hosted on that domain.

Storing the domain in the DB may be reasonable if it's done once, but WP does it multiple times: WP_SITEURL ("the address where your WordPress core files reside"), WP_HOME ("the address you want people to type in their browser to reach your WordPress blog") and of course GUIDs for every post have the domain hardcoded into their values (that can mess up links in a weird way, where you're on your local environment, click a link, and now you're silently on prod).

I could definitely be missing something, but I can't for the life of me figure out why this is a good idea.

[MichaelTieso]

There are only two places where the URL should be stored. Anywhere else is an issue with the plugin or theme storing them incorrectly. Both are contained within the wp_options table for home URL and site URL. Those are the only values required to be changed. If you have a development environment, you should not be migrating the wp-config.php file anyway as it has sensitive information for product sites thus on your dev site you can have a separate wp-config.php file to take into account the new values for home and site URL's.

[spydum]

You aren't missing anything. This problem has been there in WP for a long time, and it makes staging/testing/migration setups a horrible pain (as others have suggested, lots of search & replace).

[jdub]

It's two constants in your dev environment wp-config.php, nothing more.

[purephase]

But, it's stored all over the place, not just a single table or file. All of the URLs on the site get put into the DB as fully qualified. Just today, I had to do a search-and-replace with wp-cli on 26k instances of the domain name in the db.

Not as easy as you make it sound.

[oldmanjay]

Giving users everything they want is a surefire way to build a disaster of a codebase. I have no knowledge of WordPress, that's just a general principle. Users are a bit too silly to trust.