Woocommerce Product category base same as product base causes 404

Question

I'm facing the folloiwng problem:
I would like my products and product categories to have the same url base. E.g. www.example.com/products/product-category
www.example.com/products/sample-product

Trying to do this through the Permalinks section causes a 404 for all products. I know I can use a different name as a category base, e.g. 'foo' (www.example.com/foo/product-category), and then use the following code to re-write it to 'products':

add_filter('product_cat_rewrite_rules','update_base_category_rewrite_rule'); 
function update_base_category_rewrite_rule($category_rewrite){
    $new_category_rewrite = $category_rewrite;
    foreach($category_rewrite as $key => $value){
            $xyz = str_replace('foo', 'products', $key);
            $new_category_rewrite[$xyz] = $value; 
    } 
    return $new_category_rewrite; 

}

The problem with the above is that -as expected- all category links on the website are still in the form of www.example.com/foo/product-category

Any help with this would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can not realistically do such a thing. Wordpress URL parsing is just not "smart" enough to be able to handle different types of content under the same "prefix". Wordpress will either try to parse the URLs as product or categories, depending on the specific order they are found in the rewrite table, and will fail on the other type.

If you have to have such a scheme you can override the rewrite handling and implement one of your own (there are probably few examples on this site), but I think the work required and the complexity of code introduced by such a thing will not be worth it (the code should not be very complex by itself, but whoever will maintain the code after you will suffer a big WTF moment trying to understand what is going on).