[support] URL changes in 4.7

[Earl Miles]

Alejandro Exojo wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I am very worried about upgrading my site to 4.7, and the (complete?) drop of 
> the "base" element in this version. I agree that "base" is not perfect, and I 
> am suffering 404 errors in my logs, so a fix is welcome. I copied the site 
> installation to my local machine, and but I still have two problems:
> 
> 1. Most URLs are broken.
> 
> It seems the update.php has some rules to change URLs written by users in 
> nodes and comments, but here it didn't worked. The script forgets to change 
> URLs written like this:
> 
> 	<a href="./foo/bar">something</a>
> 
> So here, all my links in the content are broken. I think I can do something 
> passing sed to a database dump, but still is a horrible pain.
> 
> 2. The site is a lot less flexible.
> 
> Say I have my drupal installation in example.net/, and before I do a real 
> upgrade, or while I'm testing a theme, I copy it to my local machine, and I 
> do the changes there. The site is now in localhost/drupal. It worked just 
> fine in 4.6 or previous, but if URLs now are always absolute, a setup like 
> this will not work anymore. Or I am missing something?
> 
> 
> I am very surprised by this, because there is no explanation in UPGRADING.txt, 
> nor in the update.php text, nor in the 4.7.0 announcement, and in the new 
> settings.php is written that $base_url the variable is optional, but I have 
> it uncommented, and I don't see any changes. :-(

I've been thinking that what we really need is a simple filter that would 
properly do urls. It could look, for example, like:

[url=node/123]

It'd be filtered into:

http://www.example.com/directory/node/123

(I pick absolute because content can end up in an RSS feed and RSS feeds work 
better with absolute URLs)

The code to write the filter ought not be all that difficult.