When you go into your admin pages and choose Settings, Reading, you can specify whether you want to display your latest posts on the front page, or one of your existing pages, i.e. a static front page. You can also specify a page to display your posts.

The good thing about the latest version, is that all the "behind the scenes" stuff works. For example, the front page responds to the is_front_page() function whether you're displaying a static page or your latest posts.

The is_home() function returns true for the page displaying your latest posts. Be careful thought because this can change…

If you have your blog configured to show your latest posts on the front, then the front page will respond to the is_home() function.

If, however, you have a static front page, then it will be the page which you choose to display your latest posts that will respond to the is_home() function instead, and NOT the front page.

This setup is great if you have a site based completely on WordPress, but you want it to look like a normal website with a blog in a /blog/ subfolder for example. All you need to do is set a static page as the front page, and then choose a second page to display your blog posts, making sure the page slug for the second page is '/blog/'. That's it.

Now I no longer need any plugins to give me decent static front page functionality. Cool…

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/

This was all well and good, until I needed to move one of my blogs. I couldn't do a database move and had to export and then import the blog content. That's when it all started to get messy. When I imported the posts into the new blog, all the post IDs changed.

You'd sort of expect that really, but what I never thought about was that it also meant all the post permalinks changed too, because the post ID formed part of the URL. Ummm.. bad. Permalinks are supposed to be permanent.

So then what I had to do was start creating permalink redirects ..etc to make sure that people following the old links found the new posts, and this created a lot of what I'd consider unnecessary work – which is something I am allergic to.

The WordPress documentation recommends using a number as part of your permalink structure, primarily to avoid confusion with existing files such as stylesheets ..etc so that's what I did. I did read somewhere that using the post ID can decrease server load, but I couldn't find that article again and I haven't heard anything about it since. Please let me know if you have any experience of that.

After a bit of a rethink about the problem caused by using post IDs in the permalink structure, I considered the available alternatives. Maybe I could use the minute from the post date? I'm guessing that would be imported successfully, so my post URLs would stay the same if I ever needed to move a blog again.

But then I thought, just how likely is it that any of my post URLs will clash with any existing URLs, if I just use the category and post name? I think it's extremely unlikely.

So, in the absence of any real evidence that not using post IDs increases server load, and on the assumption that I'm unlikely to have URL conflicts, I've decided to use the following permalink structure;

/%postname%/

and if I ever need to move a blog again, I predict life will be very much easier.