How do I change the default behavior of my WordPress single post URL's? - ajax

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way to change the behavior of wordpress single post url's so that instead of loading the page using the single.php file, I can instead load the post contents into the index.php page via ajax. The site is a wordpress site, but uses ajax to load all of the content into one page. Essentially the actual php file being read never changes, and instead any time a user clicks a new page, the page content is loaded via on ajax request.
Is there any way that I could perhaps edit my .htaccess file so that when someone goes to www.mysite.com/blog/post-name that it loads index.php and tells a script to load the requested post contents into the index.php page via ajax?
Thanks!

Answer 1

If you already have AJAX working in your index.php file, then:
A couple of thoughts. On your server, you could delete the single.php file and create a symlink to the index.php file:
for *nix (including os x):
ln -s index.php single.php
or within the single.php file, you could delete everything and include index.php:
<?php include('index.php'); ?>
Controlling whether or not this loads via AJAX would need to be done on your client.
Or do you not have AJAX working at all yet? If not, then the answer would be slightly more complex. Here's how I setup AJAX with my wordpress sites:
On the server, I use the JSON API wordpress plugin to easily be able to provide content via AJAX (in JSON format).
On the client, you can use jQuery to capture any links to wordpress and run them through AJAX instead. I am copying some code here that retrieves a list of recent posts from a server in a different domain (so I'm using JSONP instead of straight JSON). You can see the JSON API documentation on how to modify this to just get a single post.
jQuery(function($) {
$('a').click(function(event) {
$('body').css('cursor', 'wait');
event.preventDefault(); // this prevents the regular behavior of clicking a link
$.ajax({
type:'GET',
url:url,
async:false,
jsonpCallback:'jsonCallback',
contentType:"application/json",
data: {
json: 'get_recent_posts',
count: 10,
page: page + 1
},
dataType:'jsonp'
}).always(function(){
jQuery('body').css('cursor', 'auto');
}).done(function(json) {
$.each(json.posts, function(index, value) {
tags = [];
$.each(value.tags, function(index, value) {
tags.push('' + value.title + '');
});
html =
'<div>' +
'<header class="entry-header">' +
value.title +
'<br>' +
value.date +
'</header>' +
'<div class="entry-content">' +
value.content +
'</div>' +
'</div>' +
'<span class="labels_label">'+
'Labels: ' +
'</span>' +
'<span class="labels">' +
tags.join(', ') +
'</span>' +
'<hr>';
$('.full-width .content').append(html);
});
});
});