mod_rewrite to make a short URL

Question

I have a url like:

http://skepticalgamer.com/category/slam-the-controller

I'd like to strip out "category" from the URL. So I'd want:

http://skepticalgamer.com/slam-the-controller

to act as if it were the original URL above. Is that something that can be done with mod_rewrite?

Answer 1

Yes, you could do this with mod_rewrite by doing something like this:

RewriteRule ^slam-the-controller$ category/slam-the-controller

This will take the URL:

http://skepticalgamer.com/slam-the-controller

and rewrite it to:

http://skepticalgamer.com/category/slam-the-controller

Answer 2

Then what you want is this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Make sure you have the right setup on your permanent links at your admin on wordpress so it will recreate the links shorter like you want.

Answer 3

Removing the category base is easily done with Wordpress Plugins » WP No Category Base, making changes in .htaccess unnecessary. The plugin doesn't permanently change URLs in the database, so if you disable the plugin, you get your category base back with no 404s for posts.