Taxonomy: Why 'with_front' => false DOES NOT WORK?

Question

Seriously, why 'with_front' => false does not work as it should be? It is supposed to remove TAXONOMY BASE NAME and my question is why it does not work?

I just dont want the taxonamy base slug appear in my URL and codex says 'with_front' => false should help but it does not. Leaving the slug empty like 'slug'=> '' generates 404 error.

register_taxonomy("tax_categories", array("products"), array(
    "hierarchical" => true,
    "label" => "Categories",
    "singular_label" => "Category",
    "show_ui" => true,
    'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count',
    "rewrite" => array(     
        'with_front' => false,      
        'hierarchical' => true      
        )
    ));

This issue supposed to be fixed http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16807

Please help to understand that. Thank you.

Answer 1

To remove the taxonomy base name, you can use:

'rewrite' => ['slug' => '/', 'with_front' => false]

However, this will make your (basic post type) posts go 404, if you have permalinks set to http://example.com/sample-post/. It seems you cannot have both custom taxonomy and posts reside in the root. Therefore you would go to Permalinks settings and set Custom structure , e.g. /blog/%postname%/.

One more note

A side effect is that your CPTs would have this "front", too, e.g. blog/products. This is where 'with_front' => false comes to play. It's designed to get you rid of the custom structure start. So in your product type registration, you would have:

register_post_type( 'products',  array(
           'rewrite' => array(
                'slug' => 'products',
                'with_front' => false
            ),
            /* ... */
));

Answer 2

All with_front does is toggle whether or not a taxonomy link can have something else in front of it ie extra permalink stuff from the permalinks options page. For example with_front set to true makes this possible:

blah.com/2011/09/tax/term

with it set to false, all you can do is:

blah.com/tax/term

Answer 3

Use the code below:

'rewrite' => array( 
    'slug'          => '.',
    'with_front'    => false 
),

Notice that when you rewrite the slug that the default page template is opened, when you go to the taxonomy page.