Wordpress Url Rewrite with Multiple Parameters and Templates - Dynamic Path/Parameter Placement - wordpress

Question

We're having some trouble figuring out WP URL rewrite rules when we have tokens separated by parameters. Very briefly, we'd like to have the following common format for user pages and video libraries:
/users/steve/videos/2
...where "users" is the PHP page template that displays details on a user. So if we go to:
/users/steve/
...we see Steve's home page. If we go to:
/users/steve/videos/
...we hit the page template for the video library, and we see Steve's list of videos. And if we go to:
/users/steve/videos/2
...we hit a third page template, the video player page, where we see video id 2 displayed.
So we have three separate page templates, and we would like the child / parent relationship between them to be user page -> video library page -> video player page, for our breadcrumbs display.
The trick we can't figure out is that "steve" and "2" are really params inserted into the url, interrupting the parent/child token relationship. And second, for the video player, there really isn't a token there at all that maps to the video player page template. It's just the presence of the "videos" token plus the additional numerical parameter that tells us this maps to the video player page template.
As alternative, we've figured out how to get /users/videos/steve/2 working. We've added this rewrite rule to our child theme's functions.php file:
add_rewrite_rule(
'^users/videos/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?',
'index.php?pagename=users/videos&users_filter_name=$matches[1]&user_video_id=$matches[2]',
'top');
(we've also defined the variables "users_filter_name" and "user_video_id" and we are successfully parsing them in the template)
But since what we really would like is /users/steve/videos/2 we tried updating the rule to:
add_rewrite_rule(
'^users/([^/]*)/videos/([^/]*)/?',
'index.php?pagename=users/videos&users_filter_name=$matches[1]&user_video_id=$matches[2]',
'top');
That didn't seem to work (it just loaded the '/users/' page) so we're obviously doing it incorrectly. Is what we want achievable with this structure?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The link structure of /users/steve/videos/2/ format is not a problem for Wordpress, and you actually wrote all the right code, but there is a small mistake somewhere.
Most likely you have a problem in the code section where you add new variables to query_vars.
Perhaps you are adding a second variable in too late action.
When Wordpress sees an obscure variable, it often behaves as you described.
Try removing all of your code and copy this to functions.php top
add_rewrite_rule(
'^users/([^/]*)/videos/([^/]*)/?',
'index.php?pagename=users/videos&users_filter_name=$matches[1]&user_video_id=$matches[2]',
'top');
add_filter( 'query_vars', function( $vars ){
$vars[] = 'users_filter_name';
$vars[] = 'user_video_id';
return $vars;
} );
If it doesn't work, try changing the code to this
add_rewrite_rule(
'^users/([^/]*)/videos/([^/]*)/?',
'index.php?page_id=54&users_filter_name=$matches[1]&user_video_id=$matches[2]',
'top');
add_filter( 'query_vars', function( $vars ){
$vars[] = 'users_filter_name';
$vars[] = 'user_video_id';
return $vars;
} );
Where 54 = your page ID
After each change you must go to the settings and turn off/on permalinks to reset the cache
I tested this code on my demo it works 100%.