Remove parent category from permalink? Basically only have the child category?

I think there used to be an out-dated plugin to do this. Is there any way to do this easily with just a little code? We prefer not to rely on a plugin since that makes us dependent on the developer to keep it up-to-date.

We only have two parent categories we would like to remove for all of their child-category permalinks: “items” and “genres” (so it could be tailored to just removing two category IDs)

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I see that there was a solution with the individual posts here, but I don’t think this works with the category permalinks as well, does it ?

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  1. This code pretty much does the job for this question and another one about removing the /category/ base from the permalinks. Got it from a plugin that does this, and decided to just use the raw code.

    So the permalinks only have the lowest child-category listed.

    First, we had:

    example.com/category/items/books/

    and now…

    example.com/books

    The RSS feeds, however, don’t seem to work with this shorter url, and still require the long-form url. (Not sure if there’s a fix for that.) Also, it doesn’t change the post permalink. It’s just the category permalink that changes. Paste the code below into your functions.php file. I’m using WordPress 3.0+.

    // Remove category base
    add_filter('category_link', 'no_category_parents',1000,2);
    function no_category_parents($catlink, $category_id) {
        $category = &get_category( $category_id );
        if ( is_wp_error( $category ) )
            return $category;
        $category_nicename = $category->slug;
    
        $catlink = trailingslashit(get_option( 'home' )) . user_trailingslashit( $category_nicename, 'category' );
        return $catlink;
    }
    
    // Add our custom category rewrite rules
    add_filter('category_rewrite_rules', 'no_category_parents_rewrite_rules');
    function no_category_parents_rewrite_rules($category_rewrite) {
        //print_r($category_rewrite); // For Debugging
    
        $category_rewrite=array();
        $categories=get_categories(array('hide_empty'=>false));
        foreach($categories as $category) {
            $category_nicename = $category->slug;
            $category_rewrite['('.$category_nicename.')/(?:feed/)?(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$'] = 'index.php?category_name=$matches[1]&feed=$matches[2]';
            $category_rewrite['('.$category_nicename.')/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$'] = 'index.php?category_name=$matches[1]&paged=$matches[2]';
            $category_rewrite['('.$category_nicename.')/?$'] = 'index.php?category_name=$matches[1]';
        }
        // Redirect support from Old Category Base
        global $wp_rewrite;
        $old_base = $wp_rewrite->get_category_permastruct();
        $old_base = str_replace( '%category%', '(.+)', $old_base );
        $old_base = trim($old_base, '/');
        $category_rewrite[$old_base.'$'] = 'index.php?category_redirect=$matches[1]';
    
        //print_r($category_rewrite); // For Debugging
        return $category_rewrite;
    }
    
    // Add 'category_redirect' query variable
    add_filter('query_vars', 'no_category_parents_query_vars');
    function no_category_parents_query_vars($public_query_vars) {
        $public_query_vars[] = 'category_redirect';
        return $public_query_vars;
    }
    // Redirect if 'category_redirect' is set
    add_filter('request', 'no_category_parents_request');
    function no_category_parents_request($query_vars) {
        //print_r($query_vars); // For Debugging
        if(isset($query_vars['category_redirect'])) {
            $catlink = trailingslashit(get_option( 'home' )) . user_trailingslashit( $query_vars['category_redirect'], 'category' );
            status_header(301);
            header("Location: $catlink");
            exit();
        }
        return $query_vars;
    }