1. Download HeadSpace2

Firstly, you need to download and install the HeadSpace2 SEO plugin. As well as being a mean SEO plugin (far beyond All-In-One or any other plugin you’re probably used to), HeadSpace2 lets you create custom meta data on pages, posts or categories – exactly what we need!

2. Update Page Modules

Once the plugin is activated, navigate to Settings > HeadSpace > Page Modules and drag the Custom Meta into the green Simple box – see below.

3. Add the Custom Values

Select the edit box on the right and add the custom fields you’d like to display on your category pages. I’m building an affiliate portal so have added “free-bingo-value”.

4. Edit Categories

The custom fields will now show up on your category description pages – towards the bottom. Add the value you require and update. Here you can also add any of the other modules you selected above – Page Description and Keywords, for example.

5. Call the Custom Fields

Call the custom fields anywhere (see update below) in your theme by using the following PHP code, replacing the custom field name (‘free-bingo-value’) with your own.

<?php echo MetaData::get_custom ('free-bingo-value'); ?>

Simple as that! It’ll show up without any styling, but you can place tags around it to display as you require. See the custom values on the bingo site – Red Bus Bingo.

Update:

I’ve crossed out anywhere because I’ve heard from some folks who couldn’t get it to show up on single pages.

Of course, I realise now why anywhere was far too optimistic! If you’re going to call the custom value on a single page (or anywhere in the post loop), it’s going to look for the ‘free-bingo-value’ custom value for that particular post – not for the category. So stick to pasting this on your archive.php or category.php templates.

There’s now a great plugin for this!

See WP No Category Base to download and install the plugin. It does all that the hack below does, but better, and instantly.

In fact, I did have some issues with the hack after upgrading Wordpress, so found this plugin instead.

So this one’s been a killer for a long time: you can hack Wordpress in several ways to remove /category/ from the URL, though pagination and all sorts of other nasty side-effects arise.

Anyway, it’s finally been done – you can now remove /category/ from Wordpress URLS, maintain pagination and everything else!

In fact, the fix even writes out /category/ when generating category links through get_the_category or single_cat_title: instead of just redirecting it afterwards as other hacks have done.

So here it is:

Remove the Category Base from Wordpress

If only I’d found this when he first posted it 12 months ago …!!

Enjoy!

I made a post on the Wordpress support thread with my fix, though thought I should expand here. This may not fix the issue for all users, as the reloading might be the result of other problems or faulty plugins.

1. Remove any additional rewrite rules from your .htaccess, besides the Wordpress-generated code. Remember to back it up!

(If your Wordpress settings state that your install is on http://mysite.com, but you are running a .htaccess rule to rewrite http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com, you’re running the wp-admin page in a loop of redirects).

2. If you can now log in, go to Settings and change the location of WP and your blog to http://www.mysite.com (assuming this is where you wanted Wordpress installed). If your blog or Wordpress installation is located in another dirctory or subdomain, don’t change these just add the www.

3. Re-add the .htaccess rewrites.

They might like look this –

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

(This rewrites http:// to http://www as well as removing index.html or index.php from your URLs)

If the above fix doesn’t work, try removing plugins from your server one by one and then try to log in. An outdated plugin that doesn’t work with your current version of Wordpress has also been known to cause this problem.