Function to automatically rename the base category permalink

Question

I need a function to paste in my theme that automatically rename the base category permalink from category to genre after activating the theme, example:

http://localhost/category/drama/

to

http://localhost/genre/drama/

Answer 1

So you can quickly achieve this by changing 'category' to 'genre' you can do this in Settings > Permalinks and change 'Category Base' to 'genre'.

To do it with code and keep both 'category' and 'genre' as prefixes is possible with a rewrite rule, however someone else may know a better way. You also need to only run flush_rewrite_rules() once so you need to take care of only calling this code when you change the rewrite rule!

This works for me in functions.php:

function add_category_base() {
  add_rewrite_rule('^genre/([^/]+)/?', 'index.php?taxonomy=category&term=$matches[1]', 'top');
  flush_rewrite_rules();
}

add_action('init', 'add_category_base', 10, 0);

As I said, you should not run flush_rewrite_rules all the time as it does a lot of stuff and only needs to be run when you change the rule.