Category Permalinks Problem with Base Category

Hello,

I just switched to WordPress last week from Drupal and I’m having a couple of issues related to Category and Permalinks Management. Let’s start with the basic Permalink Problem,

1) For some reason, I can’t get it to work. When I select a permalink structure, they work perfectly fine on the articles, but they end up breaking the categories. So at the moment I have about 30 categories –

movies,
television,
dvds

I would like my link structure to be either

https://www.eclipsemagazine.com/postnumber/articlename

but when I do this

the categories end up breaking because the category becomes

https://www.eclipsemagazine.com/category/dvds/hotshots-rules

instead of

https://www.eclipsemagazine.com/dvds/hotshots-rules

If I put /%category/ in the category base then I get

https://www.eclipsemagazine.com/dvds/dvds/

(category name gets doubled)

which pulls up a blank category page or page not found error message.

And under the double name category option, the category displays all the entries, but when you click the url it breaks.

Can someone please help me and let me know how to fix this?

2) How do I remove posts from the homepage, I’d like to run my blog as a blog network and have all the categories be their own separate thing and create a custom homepage with RSS Feeds from each category, and there are other times where I want a post to appear in it’s topic area but not on the home page. I tried the Category Exclude Plugin but that Excludes Categories and no selectable posts.