Solution: Remove Author Slug / Base / Prefix

Hi,

I’m not asking a question. I was looking for ages for a simple solution to a problem and couldn’t find anything that worked. Until I stumbled on a way to do it which was really by chance rather than brilliant Google research.

Basically I had the request from a client to remove the slug / base/ prefix for authors in WordPress. So that the author.php pages loaded for usernames straight on the domain:

standard way: domain.com/author/bubba
requested way: domain.com/bubba

Basically the client wants to promote the authors in print material with a nice short domain name. The people are the service of the business if that makes sense.

Anyway I tried the functions.php code listed in Stack Overflow articles and other blog posts and it didn’t work. I just got 404 errors.

And when I was going to give up I came across this:

http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/wp-htaccess-control/

HTaccess Control plugin simply removes the slug for authors as part of it’s default settings.

I know plugins are not the best approach for building sites. But this solved a problem I could not find a way round.

All of the Stack Overflow articles were closed to comments so posting here will hopefully help other people who were in a similar situation to me.

Cheers,
Nick.