WordPress does a pretty good job making things configurable just about everywhere – either via plugin or options in the admin side of things. There are a few exceptions however, and I was wondering if it would be reasonable to consider an semi-hidden group of settings similar to those you can access in Firefox via the about:config screen. In other words, settings that only the technical would access – with a “use at your own risk” disclaimer of sorts. To easily maintain overridden settings between upgrades, you could just set your override values in a plugin.

Something I’d like to propose for this type of setting is the ability to turn off the “each post slug must be unique” functionality. Yes, there is a plugin that sort of fixes this; however the “fix” occurs after the pingbacks and trackbacks have been sent. As a result, I’ve stopped sending pingbacks or trackbacks from my “Around the web” posts as the post link being sent is later “fixed” to remove the number.

I understand why it makes sense to have code in the WP core to “save the users from themselves”, but if I’ve set up my permalinks so that I know I won’t be creating collisions by using the same post slug – I want an easy way to accomodate this as well.

What do you think? Good idea? Not? I guess it’s too late to submit a patch for 2.0 anyway, but I wanted to put the idea out there.

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m talking about situations where an option might be confusing for casual users, or something (like requiring unique post slugs) is in place to protect people from shooting themselves in the foot, but a valid argument can be made in the mind of the developer implementing the feature to allow the alternate functionality. In these situations, the dev could simply add an option (to the vars.php file perhaps) and structure their code accordingly. If someone needs to flip around the way it works, they can simply override the variable in a plugin. It avoids adding upgrade complexity and clutter in the options screen, but still allows for clean override ability.