Remove slug from Custom Category Permalink + dual-category permalinks

Question

I'll try to make this as clear as possible.

I'm am trying to figure out a few things to clean up the permalinks on a large website project. We're using custom post types and ~200+ custom categories (we chose this because you can really add a lot of custom field spaces and data easily with the new custom post types).

We need our permalinks to look like this:

example.com/books/adventure/post-name

where "books" and "adventure" are both categories, but we would prefer "books" came first.

We would create adventure as a sub-category of books, but we use this same category for
adventure movies, adventure games, etc.

So a large site with books, movies, games, etc. where a person first chooses one of those categories and then drills down deeper to adventure, romance, kids, etc.

Right now, we have:

example.com/main-category/books

example.com/sub-category/adventure

example.com/product/post-name

Basically I need to:

1. Remove the slugs from the custom type categories (i.e. main-category & sub-category)

2. Make the "sub-category" appear after the "main-category" for the permalinks for sub-category pages.

3. Create a new dynamic base category for the custom posts, which reflects the categories it's in (/books/adventures/post-name).

4. Do this as simply and clean as possible, without a lot of plugins or things that may cause trouble down the line.

OR...if you have a much better way to do this, I'm open to any suggestions.

I know that we can use a Wordpress Network install instead of main-categories, but with 50-100+ of them, that is not feasible for us.

Answer 1

There is no such thing as a "dual category permalink" in wordpress, so you might be looking for custom rewrite rules (Wordpress.org Forums) and let deal your own code with the URL design as you need it then.