Per-entry URL for entries a urlPattern can't express (a urlField setting)

[AaronDDM]

The problem

A collection's urlPattern is the only way EmDash knows an entry's public URL, and it can only be filled with {slug}, {id} and date tokens. Sites migrated from WordPress often keep URLs that no single pattern expresses. In our case:

• landing pages live under /solutions/<area>/<page>/, /integrations/<page>/, /products/<page>/, /comparison/<page>/;
• some pages sit at one-off root paths (/privacy-policy/, /security/...);
• 53 of our 55 landing entries, and entries in six other collections, are like this.

So we store each entry's URL in a path field, and our routes build the page there. EmDash doesn't know about that field, so every admin link to such an entry points at the pattern's URL, which 404s:

• View live in the editor, the content list's view icon, the calendar panel, and the preview fallback;
• the rich-text link picker (resolveHref), which writes that wrong URL into other entries' content, so the broken link gets stored, not just displayed.

Splitting collections by URL prefix doesn't help: the one-off paths still have no pattern, and a collection is a content shape, not a URL family. There's no plugin hook, config option or field role to override one entry's URL (getPublicUrl reads the pattern and can't be changed).

Proposal

A collection-level setting naming the field that holds an entry's own URL, e.g. in the seed or the content type editor:

{ "slug": "landing", "urlPattern": "/lp/{slug}/", "urlField": "path" }

When the entry's urlField value is a safe site-relative path (one leading /, no backslash or control characters), it replaces the pattern; otherwise the pattern applies as today. Places that would honour it:

• admin: contentUrl and its callers (View live, list icon, calendar, preview fallback, link picker);
• core: interpolateUrlPattern consumers (getPublicUrl, the preview-url route, sitemaps, hreflang, menus' content items). The link picker would need the entry's data (it already fetches the entry for date-token patterns).

Slug-change auto-redirects could skip entries whose URL comes from the field, since their URL doesn't change with the slug.

A related gap: the admin on its own host

Our admin runs on a separate host from the public site (behind Cloudflare Access), and the site is static. The admin's links are site-relative, so even a correct path opens on the admin's host. It would help if links that open a page (not the link picker's, which should stay relative) used the origin of the Site URL setting, as canonical URLs and sitemaps already do in 1.2.

What we do today

We run both as a small local patch on @emdash-cms/admin@1.1.0: contentUrl takes an optional path from a fixed path field, and page-opening links are prefixed with the Site URL's origin. We'd much rather drop the patch for a supported setting, and we're happy to contribute a PR if this direction is acceptable.

Related: #687 (URL pattern design alternatives), #2554 and #3366 (reading an entry's public URL), #2975 and #1099 (templates missing a urlPattern).

Drafted with Claude (Claude Opus 5.5) - hope this is okay!

[MA2153]

Hi Aaron, thanks for sharing!

Not against this, but it feels more like a band-aid rather than addressing the underlying issue or need.

Could you share more about your use case, like why do these entries need to have different paths? Is there some pattern or grouping going on?

[AaronDDM]

It could be a really bespoke thing that we're doing, but we essentially moved our landing pages to a collection type. But each landing page doesn't just live under one sub-folder/path. It changes per product.

This doesn't work with emDash as it is designed right now. Each content type gets its own slug and eveything under it has use that same slug.

So we want to do this:

landing pages live under

- /integrations/<page>/
- /products/<page>/
- /comparison/<page>/```

But with the current solution, it can only ever be:

```- /lp/solutions/<area>/<page>/
- /lp/integrations/<page>/
- /lp/products/<page>/
- /lp/comparison/<page>/```