Fortes

The Top Level Categories plugin allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. For example, instead of http://fortes.com/category/work, I use http://fortes.com/work for the address my “work” category. WordPress doesn’t allow you to have a blank prefix for categories (they insert <code>category/</code> before the name), this plugin works around that restriction.
<h3>Known Issues / Bugs</h3>
<ol>
<li>This plugin will not work if you have a permalink structure like <code>%postname</code> or <code>%category%/%postname%</code> — there is currently no workaround</li>
</ol>
<h3>Uninstall</h3>
<ol>
<li>Deactivate the plugin</li>
<li>That’s it! 🙂</li>
</ol>

Top Level Categories

This plugin allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page (e.g. example.com/dogs instead of example.com/category/dogs)

Tor N. Johnson

dcartist

This plugin is DEPRECATED! Do NOT use it on new installations. It has been updated for legacy support only and no longer will function for new content creation. If you need custom permalinks beyond what WP supports, consider plugins like permalink-manager.
This plugin is a fork of the Custom-Permalinks plugin. It has some expanded bug patches AND is able to interoperate with the WP-no-category-base plugin.
This plugin will allow you to set permalinks in a more precise way – in short you can include sub-folders. A page could have the permalink http://www.example.com/aFolder/anotherFolder/page.html without having to create the intermediate pages or categories aFolder/anotherFolder/.
Be warned: This plugin is not a replacement for WordPress’s built-in permalink system. Check your WordPress 
administration’s “Permalinks” settings page first, to make sure that this doesn’t already meet your needs.
This plugin is only useful for assigning custom permalinks for individual posts, pages, tags or categories. 
It will not apply whole permalink structures, or automatically apply a category’s custom permalink to the posts 
within that category.

Enhanced Custom Permalinks

Works great on simple templates, but if you change the permalink of a page using a custom query template with a paged parameter, it returns a 404 error on page/2, page/3, etc.



Works for the most part

Set custom permalinks on a per-post, per-tag or per-category basis.

Top Level Categories vs Enhanced Custom Permalinks