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Stephanie Leary

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Removing the category base from permalinks

August 7, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Search the web for ways of removing the category base from your WordPress permalinks, and you’ll come up with a lot of wacky methods that don’t really work. They can be quite complicated; this one requires changing two theme files and .htaccess and still produces 404 errors on category archive pages. Changing the category base to “./” doesn’t work for the category archive pages either, although it does a nice job on individual pages.

Fortunately, WP No Category Base works beautifully. It requires no changes to theme files or .htaccess at all, and works for category archive pages as well as single posts. Kudos to iDope for this excellent plugin.

Make sure, however, that you don’t have any categories and pages with identical titles! Otherwise visitors will see the page when they expect to see the category archive.

WordPress archives, categories, Permalinks

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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