Question about Permalink Structure

I’m pretty sure that you can’t have two separate permalink structures, right? (Like one way for Pages and Categories, and another for posts?)

I’m assuming that can’t be done.

So I was hoping someone could offer up an alternative suggestion for me. I know you *can* use %postname% in your permalink structure, but doing so opens up the possibility of issues if you name a Page, post, and/or category with the same name.

However, I need for my URLs to look like so:

http://www.sitename.com/about (for the “About” Page)

http://www.sitename.com/tools (for the “Tools” category)

http://www.sitename.com/3/2007/this-is-an-archived-post (for the posts)

Is there any way to accomplish such a thing? I guess I won’t say it’s *impossible* to do it via .htaccess, but I’m not familiar enough with it to manually code my .htaccess files to specify the date-and-name-based for posts only, and just name-based for Pages and Categories. Is there an alternate way to accomplish this, like a plugin?

If I knew what lines to edit in my .htaccess file, I’d give it a shot myself (in fact, I think I will!) but any input or suggestions anyone has would be appreciated.