Scriptrunner (Doug Sparling)

Nah, it keeps me on my toes…

I can’t guarantee it’ll be the same for your theme, especially as it’s not a WordPress.org theme, but the quick and dirty is you can comment out the_title(), which may be in page.php. This is one way you could do it with the default WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme:

<h1 class="entry-title"><?php //the_title(); ?></h1>

In the Twenty Eleven theme functions.php, change line 379 from:

$args['show_home'] = true;

to:

$args['show_home'] = 'Welcome';

To show the change in context, here’s the same change, but showing the entire method.

Change:

function twentyeleven_page_menu_args( $args ) {
    if ( ! isset( $args['show_home'] ) )
        $args['show_home'] = true;
    return $args;
}

to:

function twentyeleven_page_menu_args( $args ) {
    if ( ! isset( $args['show_home'] ) )
        $args['show_home'] = 'Welcome';
    return $args;
}

Note: This won’t work on all themes, but will on Twenty Eleven.

I’ve had a bad theme use the wrong hook and create dozens of unnecessary database queries, so you might try a default theme like Twentytwelve or Twentythirteen. I also had great luck with DB Cache Reloaded Fix where the standard caching plugins weren’t improving performance as much as I’d hoped.

As esmi said, it’s best not to modify core files. WordPress uses Magpie to cache feeds for one hour (in wp-includes/rss.php). I will modify it at times when I’m working on a problem with feeds, but unless you need to, it’s best to wait the 60 minutes. The only way to change the cache time (or disable it) is in the core file itself.

The feed is cached by WordPress for an hour. There is a way to disable that, but probably best to just wait.

I believe something like this will work:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldcat/(.*)$ /newcat/$1

It should redirect:

http://www.example.com/oldcat/something
http://www.example.com/oldcat/something/

but not

http://www.example.com/oldcat
http://www.example.com/oldcat/

I think that last rule you posts (RewriteRule ^oldcat/?(.*)$ newcat/$1 [R=301,L]) tried to compensate for that, but it caused me issues…trying to fix.

Ah, right, when I saw Settings->Reading I assumed the OP was talking about feeds, even though he wasn’t 🙂