Show custom category archive as front page and remove taxonomy slug from urls

Question

I have an art portfolio site in development.

I have used CPT UI to set up:
post type: works
taxonomy: mediums
mediums: paintings, etc

The best way I could think to set this up was to use taxonomy-medium.php as the archive/template for displaying these custom posts.

This is working fine with the following code:

<?php if ($posts) : ?>
    <!-- Slider main container -->
    <div class="swiper mySwiper">
        <!-- Additional required wrapper -->
        <div class="swiper-wrapper">
            <!-- Slides -->
            <?php foreach ($posts as $post) :
                setup_postdata($post) ?>
                <div class="swiper-slide"><?php the_content(); ?></div>
            <?php endforeach; ?>
        </div>
    </div>


    <!-- If we need pagination -->
    <div class="swiper-pagination"></div>

    <!-- If we need navigation buttons -->
    <div class="swiper-button-prev"></div>
    <div class="swiper-button-next"></div>

<?php wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Now I want to clean up the UI by doing 2 things. First, I would like to remove the custom taxonomy slug from urls, changing it from https://site.dev/medium/paintings to https://site.dev/paintings
I've tried several plugins that claim to do this and none worked.

Next I would like to forego a landing page, and just have https://site.dev/paintings as the front page, showing the content from the archive page code shown above.

I have looked through many answers to both these questions, and have not been able to find a working solution. If I set a page with:

<?php locate_template( 'taxonomy-medium.php', TRUE, TRUE ); ?>

it loads the slider but returns no posts. Ideally I would also like the home url to redirect to https://site.dev/paintings so that clicking on menu item paintings shows the same url.

Answer 1

I was able to solve this by removing CPT UI plugin, registering the custom post type with:

function create_post_type() {
  $args = array (
      'public' => true,
      'has_archive' => true,
      'show_ui' => true,
      'supports' => array('revision','title','editor','author', 'thumbnail', 'custom-fields'),
      'taxonomies'          => array( 'category' ),
      'labels' => array(
        'name' => __( 'work' ),
        'singular_name' => __( 'work' )
      )
  );
  register_post_type('work', $args);
}

Then in category.php:

<?php get_header();

    $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'work',
        'cat' => get_query_var('cat'),
        'posts_per_page' => -1 );

    $loop = new WP_Query( $args ); ?>

    <!-- Slider main container -->
    <div class="swiper mySwiper">
        <!-- Additional required wrapper -->
        <div class="swiper-wrapper">
            <!-- Slides -->
            <?php while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post(); ?>
                <div class="swiper-slide"><?php the_content(); ?></div>
            <?php endwhile; ?>
        </div>
    </div>

    <!-- If we need pagination -->
    <div class="swiper-pagination"></div>

    <!-- If we need navigation buttons -->
    <div class="swiper-button-prev"></div>
    <div class="swiper-button-next"></div>

<?php
// get_sidebar();
get_footer();

It wasn't immediately intuitive that 'cat' needed to be specified to filter results by the current category, and not have all posts returned.

For now I'm using a plugin 'Remove Taxonomy Slug' to change the url from /category/name to /name

It seemed unnecessarily difficult to have the homepage be a specific category archive (from category.php) so I'm showing the About page instead.