<p>I love using WordPress to power websites.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>With the launch of my redesigned site, I was interested in using the <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/">WP-PageNavi plugin</a> because I think it provides much better paging than the default WordPress previous/next.</p>

<p>The problem is that WordPress includes <strong>/category/</strong> in the URL, and I hate it. For example, on my <a href="//trevor-davis.com/blog/">blog page</a>, you can click the older entries link at the bottom of the content area, and you can see that the link points to here:</p>
<div class="codeblock"><code>
//trevor-davis.com/blog/page/2/ 

</code></div>

<p>But, you will notice that you actually get redirected to:</p>
<div class="codeblock"><code>
//trevor-davis.com/category/blog/page/2/ 

</code></div>

<p>I had to do this because <a href="//trevor-davis.com/blog/page/2/">/blog/page/2/</a> returned a 404 error. You can see this by going <a href="//trevor-davis.com/blog/page/3/">directly to the third page</a>.</p>

<h2>Some Suggested Fixes</h2>
<p>I read through <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=359">a couple</a> of <a href="http://wordpress.org/support/topic/98005">forum posts</a>  discussing the problem, but none of the fixes mentioned seemed to work.</p>
<p>The most discussed suggestion was to change the category base permalink to <strong>/.</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>Another suggestion was to edit a core WordPress file, which I do not want to do.</p>

<h2>Plugins to Fix the Problem?</h2>
<p>I came across 3 plugins that were supposed to fix the problem, but none of them worked for me either.</p>
<ul><li><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/top-level-cats/">Top Level Categories</a></li>
 <li><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/decategorizer/">Decategorizer</a></li>
 <li><a href="http://www.brianshoff.com/wordpress/category-base-removal-plugin.htm">Category Base Killer</a></li>
</ul><h2>My Idea</h2>
<p>So I am not the greatest with regular expressions and htaccess and all that jazz, but my thinking is that I can use the <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/">Redirection plugin</a> to use a pass-through to rewrite any link like this:</p>
<div class="codeblock"><code>
/blog/page/(*)/ 

</code></div>
<p>To this:</p>
<div class="codeblock"><code>
/blog/page/$1/ 

</code></div>

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