[wp-hackers] remove a category name from the internal rewrite rules?

[Scott Plumlee]

I browsed through the support forums and thought this might be a little 
too involved for there, so I'm trying here.

I use wordpress as a CMS for our site (which has worked superbly, the 
flexibility is excellent).  We run some monthly specials, and I use the 
category of 'specials' to indicate an item is on sale and to replace the 
price with the sale price along with some other trickery.

I didn't realize when I set up my permalinks using categories and post 
name that I would be creating a problem.  When I add an item to the 
'specials' category, the permalink changes because the 'specials' 
category is one of the lowest numbered categories, lower than the normal 
category of the item.  So instead of the permalink being 
'/itemcategory/itemname', it's '/specials/itemname'.

I considered changing the category number of 'special' to something like 
9999 and then resetting the auto increment setting to start at a lower 
number. But before I do that, I'm wondering if it's possible to exclude 
certain categories from the internal rewrite rules, in effect hiding 
those categories from the process that creates the permalink.  If anyone 
has another idea about how to do this, I'd be interested.