Permalinks without subdirectories

Question

Today I use:

permalink_structure: /%postname%

This gives me URL like this on my pages:

1. #http://www.mypage.com/page1
2. #http://www.mypage.com/page1/page2
3. #http://www.mypage.com/page1/page2/page3

But I want it to be:

1. #http://www.mypage.com/page1
2. #http://www.mypage.com/page2
3. #http://www.mypage.com/page3

How can I make this happen?

I still want to use the parent function in wordpress admin...

The reasons why I want this are:

• It looks so much better
• When I (or some one else) change URL of page1 I am not messing up the URL for page 2 and page3 (less 301 work)
• (Better SEO)

Answer 1

One solution would be to create all your pages as root pages and then use the Menu page in "Appearance -> Menus" to define the structure of the pages. This assumes that your theme supports Menus, which the default Wordpress themes TwentTen and TwentyEleven do.

Update:

Here's a couple of links that might help you do this without using the menus functionality (as I fully agree with your comment that it's a little annoying to use the menus functionality).

This is a plugin which seems like it might help:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-permalinks/

And here's an example of hacking the Wordpress core code (which I would generally not recommend):

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/page-permalinks-without-hierarchy-parents

I haven't tried either though.