What are the permalinks options for “Category” base and removing it?

Question

Under "Settings > Permalinks", we can set up the default category base name to use for our category landing pages. For example, site.com/categories/my-first-category/.

Is there a setting I can add to my functions.php to allow the option to remove the category base and direct link to the category? For example, the above link becomes: site.com/my-first-category/

I realize that this opens up the possibility of having conflicting post names and category names (assuming I have a post slug that's the same as a category slug for example), but in this case, my post permalinks end in .html and my category permalinks will not, so there should never be a conflict (I expect).

Answer 1

there is an answer to on how to do that in the WordPress way here

but a faster way is using the .htaccess file by adding this line

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]

just make sure you change http://www.yourblog.com/ to what ever is needed.

Hope this helps.