Joseph Hinson

Do you have a lot of categories and are sick of having a huge list in your sidebar? Want to highlight only a few of them to make your site easier to navigate?
While redesigning WordPress sites for our clients we kept running into this problem over and over. They had a huge list of legacy categories but only wanted to highlight a few of them. We wrote this plugin to allow them to select which categories to show and which categories to initially hide.
All categories are still accessible by a “see all” link at the bottom of the list.
Add the widget to your sidebar to make it live.

Category Expander

Allows WordPress Admins to show only a selected few categories on the sidebar and hide the rest from view until visitor clicks "See All".

Marios Alexandrou

DigitalME

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. ‘mysite.com/category/my-category/’ to ‘mysite.com/my-category/’ ).
The plugin requires no setup or modifying core wordpress files and will not break any links. It will also take care of redirecting your old category links to the new ones.
<h4>Features</h4>
<ol>
<li>Better and logical permalinks like ‘mysite.com/my-category/’ and ‘mysite.com/my-category/my-post/’.</li>
<li>Simple plugin – barely adds any overhead.</li>
<li>Works out of the box – no setup needed.</li>
<li>No need to modify WordPress files.</li>
<li>Doesn’t require other plugins to work.</li>
<li>Compatible with sitemap plugins.</li>
<li>Compatible with WPML.</li>
<li>Works with multiple sub-categories.</li>
<li>Works with WordPress Multisite.</li>
<li>Redirects old category permalinks to the new ones (301 redirect, good for SEO).</li>
</ol>

No Category Base (WPML)

This plugin removes the mandatory 'Category Base' from your category permalinks. It's compatible with WPML.

Category Expander vs No Category Base (WPML)