I submitted a ticket to the WordPress Trac about a problem with perma-link previewing and it was ignored for a while. Then someone submitted a bug report very similiar to mine–and Denis de Bernardy said that mine was redundant to that subsequent one that had been submitted, and also to another previous one (#6619) that actually isn’t the same issue and is only tangentially related, but that he had reported. Here is ticket #6619 as submitted by de Bernardy:
“if you create a sub-page, the permalink field should display the proper permalink.
currently, if you have:
site.com/page/
and when you create:
site.com/page/subpage/
the permalink shows:
site.com/subpage/
until it gets saved
the expected behavior would be for it to show the correct permalink.
the same remark applies when you then change the permalink. if the parent is no longer page, but rather page-2, then the permalink should update accordingly.”
Here is my report, #7183:
“When writing a post: If you fill out the title field, then start editing the body of the post, the perma-link preview will match your title (in slug form). So far, so good.
But let’s say you decide to change the title before publishing–in that instance, the perma-link preview will stay the same as the original title, but when the post is actually published the perma-link (slug) will turn out to reflect the later, edited title. The same issue applies when leaving the title field blank at first–but in this case the slug is auto-assigned as the post number, and not updated when the user goes back to change the title–but the slug turns out reflecting the title anyway when the post is published.
(I know that this differs when one actually edits the perma-link and hits save.)
Judging by the behavior I’ve described, at first I actually thought that there might be a feature that allowed the user to create the slug first and then go back and change the post title to something different, but then I realized that such a feature was illusory and what we really have here is a bug, however minor, that can be confusing and cause link breakage.
Fixing this (by having the slug updated each time the post is auto-saved, perhaps?) would improve consistency and predictability and create a more intuitive interface.”
And here is the one (#7733) that is still in effect (though unfixed of course) even though it was submitted after mine:
“When writing a new post, the permalink is shown based on the title of the first autosave (instead of first save). The permalink is correctly set upon first save, but this behavior can be confusing as the permalink appears to change on the first save.
I believe this first appeared with autosave in version 2.6. It still exists in version 2.6.2 (not available in the version drop down).
To reproduce this: 1. Create a new post 2. Enter some body text 3. Wait for the autosave 4. Note that the permalink is shown to be the post number 5. Enter a title 6. Note the permalink does not change 7. Save the post 8. Note that the permalink has been updated to reflect the title.”
So why was the third one noticed and mine (the second one quoted above) ignored? Mine was moved out from version 2.5 which I reported it for to version 2.9 almost immediately by Ryan Boren, and after the second ticket was submitted by azaozz for version 2.6 it was picked up on fairly quickly and then my ticket was dismissed by Bernardy.
So what is the lesson? Basically, if you have a bug report to submit to WordPress, don’t bother unless you are a core committer or at least high-profile on the WP Trac. Otherwise your ticket will probably be ignored until one of the above submits a similar report anyway.