Removing posts

I've made some changes to the way I remove a post to preserve the permalink and give a more meaningful, user-friendly response.

Generally I don't need or wish to delete posts I've publish however on occasions it's necessary: because either the content has failed to syndicate to other sources properly or I wish to revoke an opinion or comment made in haste.

In such cases I'd previously returned a 404 Not Found response for deleted posts. This not only went against recommended implementation but, now that I regularly Send Webmentions; it's all the more important should I later decide to revoke a reply/RSVP or like that I return a clear, valid response on the page receiving the webmention.

Updating not deleting

In the PHP class I used for adding, updating and removing posts I amended the existing delete function so that rather than clearing the entry completely; it just updates the post type to "removed". This not only keeps the permalink in place but should I later want to reinstate the post then all the contents is still within the database.

Sending a second Webmention

Furthermore if the post type is a webmention then the target URL stored within the post is pinged again to tell it that the reply, RSVP or like has now been removed.

The front-end

On the front-end I use a conditional statement above the template's content for rendering posts to check if it's been categorised as removed.

if ( $resultsNotes->noteType == 'removed' ) :
  header("HTTP/1.1 410 Gone");
  //echo 'The requested page has been removed.';
  require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/410.php';
  exit;
endif;

Posts that have the "removed" type include the new header with the more appropriate response code 410 (Gone). Following this is a custom template included to override the browser's generic 410 response page.

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