<b>The URL pattern lock</b>

<b>The URL pattern lock</b>

Decide the URL grammar once, lock it, and never improvise per-template. Pattern drift across a pSEO site is the most expensive thing to fix later.

Lock these before the first page renders:

☐ Segment order fixed: /{category}/{entity} — never reorder per section
☐ Casing fixed: lowercase only, no exceptions
☐ Separator fixed: hyphen, never underscore or %20
☐ Slug source fixed: derived from one canonical field, stored, never recomputed
☐ Stopword policy fixed: documented which words drop from slugs
☐ Trailing slash policy fixed: one choice, enforced by 301
☐ ID-in-URL decision made: if used, ID position is fixed forever

Guardrail: store the generated slug in the database row. Never regenerate slugs from the title at render time. A title edit must never silently change a URL.

Gate: if a future template needs a new pattern, it gets a new top-level segment, never a variation of an existing one.

Ship gate: don't publish until the pattern is documented and slugs are persisted in storage.