[wp-hackers] is it a good idea to remove the category base?

[IC IC]

It seems like there are no performance issues with removing the
category base. This is from the responses I collected from you guys...

Comparing the two below, I myself don't see much of a performance
issue neither.

.com/category/%category%
vs
.com//%category%

so

.com/countries/USA
vs
.com/USA

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the above example, wordpress will look for a URL, that is /USA as a
category? If there was a match, then bingo.
It would not matter if you also had a page called /USA. That page
would never be accessible in this circumstance. So when you remove the
cat base, be careful with your page names!

I'm wondering how does wordpress match the current URL? What look up
does it do?

Is it something like

select current url from ?? where where url is a category?

And if we had the category base in there, would that SQL query be more
efficient?
Hard to tell.  It's still confusing to me...

What got me into this was Codex info on permaliks which states that
you can change the Category base and the Tag base, but you can't
remove them from the URLs altogether here!

My immediate reaction, there must be a wisdom behind it otherwise just
like they allow us to change them, they would have allowed us to
remove them as well.

Did they just not care about it and leave it upto a plug in to take
care of it? Is this conclusion final?

And if so, what plugin do you recommend that does this ( the removal ) right?

thanks

On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 4:09 AM, David Law
<wp-hackers at google-adsense-templates.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Dec 2011 19:06:04 +1100, you wrote:
>
>>I recall reading a post on Otto site about having the post id missing
>>from the perm url. I dont know if that the same thing though. Sent
>>from phone
>
> Do you mean the performance issue with using a permalink setting:
>
> /%postname%
>
> If so that's fixed in WordPress 3.3 which is in RC1, guess 3.3 will be
> released this month.
>
> David
> --
> http://www.stallion-theme.com/ Stallion WordPress SEO Theme
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