I love using WordPress to power websites.

While it began strictly as a blogging platform, it has evolved into a pretty solid CMS, but there is one little thing that has been bugging me for a while now.

With the launch of my redesigned site, I was interested in using the WP-PageNavi plugin because I think it provides much better paging than the default WordPress previous/next.

The problem is that WordPress includes /category/ in the URL, and I hate it. For example, on my blog page, you can click the older entries link at the bottom of the content area, and you can see that the link points to here:


//trevor-davis.com/blog/page/2/

But, you will notice that you actually get redirected to:


//trevor-davis.com/category/blog/page/2/

I had to do this because /blog/page/2/ returned a 404 error. You can see this by going directly to the third page.

Some Suggested Fixes

I read through a couple of forum posts discussing the problem, but none of the fixes mentioned seemed to work.

The most discussed suggestion was to change the category base permalink to /., but that did not work for me. Surprisingly, some people said it worked for them. That was pretty bizarre to me, so I kept looking.

Another suggestion was to edit a core WordPress file, which I do not want to do.

Plugins to Fix the Problem?

I came across 3 plugins that were supposed to fix the problem, but none of them worked for me either.

My Idea

So I am not the greatest with regular expressions and htaccess and all that jazz, but my thinking is that I can use the Redirection plugin to use a pass-through to rewrite any link like this:


/blog/page/(*)/

To this:


/blog/page/$1/

Is that not possible? I could not get it to work. Does anyone know how to get something like this to work? WordPress team, why has this been a problem for so long?

A Plea for WordPress Help