In my opinion, the whole concept of storing “permalinks” – a hardcoded link for each page in a database is mad! Even if WP had a mapping table (post <=> link) the server must still look through potentially thousands of records with each request. On top of that comes the headache if anything needs to be changed at some point.

I’m puzzled as to why WP doesn’t just use some general rewrite rules that you can specify and which are mapped to querystring parameters, just like in .htaccess. The same rules could be applied in a function to create the URLs for display on the site.

Say you had a CMS for shops. Each shop was a post. The shops had products that was also posts. Here is an example in the syntax used by htaccess, but rules could be handled by the WP parsing function just the same:

RewriteRule ^/shops/([0-9]+)/products/([0-9]+)/*$ /index.php?post_id=$2&post_type=products [L,I]
RewriteRule ^/shops/([0-9]+)/products/*$ /index.php?page_id=1248&shop_id=$1 [L,I]
RewriteRule ^/shops/([0-9]+)/*$ /index.php?post_id=$2&post_type=shops [L,I]
RewriteRule ^/shops/*$ /index.php?page_id=56 [L,I]

Nothing besides a few rules would ever need to be stored in the DB, and requests would be lightning fast.