A quick note about WordPress permalinks
WordPress allows you to configure the format of the permalink to posts in your blog. If you have configured your permalink so that it starts with a string rather than an integer then the ScreenSteps Live plugin will not work properly.
The ScreenSteps Live plugin generates URLs that don't actually exist and then parses the url to determine which manual or lesson to display. When using a permalink that starts with a string WordPress generates a 404 error before the ScreenSteps Live plugin gets a chance to parse the url.
In addition, WordPress advises people NOT to use permalinks that start with strings for performance reasons. For more information review the page located at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. As of February 20, 2010 that page reads in part: "For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields."
Example of a Bad Permalink
This is a bad example of a permalink. %postname% is a string and will cause performance issues with WordPress and will break the ScreenSteps Live plugin.
Example of a Good Permalink
This is a good example of a permalink. %year% is an integer and will work just fine.
In the soon-to-be released WordPress 3.3 there is significant changes to the handling of permalinks and the rewrite engine. How will that affect the plugin? Are you guys altering the plugin to take advantage of the improvements or will the plugin see benefits regardless. Thanks.
@Kevin: We are not aware of what changes are being made in WordPress 3.3 so I can't really say. If the update breaks the plugin then we can take a look at what is necessary to fix it.
Take a look at the proposed changes in the "Internal: Performance Improvements" section on http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/wordpress-3-3-proposed-scope/
They are removing the performance issues associated with using /%postname%/ as the permalink structure, making it not only the desired structure, but also eliminating any performance hits as a result. Will you guys rework the plugin so that we can use this structure without having to use a numeric prefix?
If WordPress doesn't display a 404 error before our plugin is able to process the request then everything should "just work". If WordPress continues to generate 404 error messages then I don't know that there is anything we can do about it.
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