title: Is it possible to change the Wordpress parameter "/page/2" to something else?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Disclaimer</strong>: I'm working on a legacy corporate WP site (PHP 5.3.3), and I can't make very many major breaking changes.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I am adding pagination to an existing resources page (/resources). I'm fairly new to Wordpress in general, but I do have my page working and displaying the correct number of resources on page load.</p>
  
  <p>My question is: when you paginate in Wordpress using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php next_posts_link( 'More Resources' , $the_query-&gt;max_num_pages ); ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It creates a link on the page, and when you click it, WP automagically adds the page param like so: <strong>/resources/page/2/</strong>. The issue I'm having is that I get a 404 the minute I click it. I've done a ton of reading on this, and the main reason this happens usually is when you make a custom query using wp_query, and the number of posts in the custom query differs from the one in the main page query. I thought this was the issue originally, so I moved the logic to set the posts_per_page param into a <strong>pre_post_load</strong> hook, and this is functioning fine:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function exp_wp_modify_main_query ( $query ) {
  
      if ( $query-&gt;is_page( 'resources' ) &amp;&amp; $query-&gt;is_main_query() ) { // Run only on resources page
          $query-&gt;query_vars['posts_per_page'] = 8;
      }
  
  }
  
  add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'exp_wp_modify_main_query' );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I do have enough blog posts to require pagination (there are more posts than my number of posts per page). I believe the issue is related to the fact that this page is set up without categories. The resources page doesn't have categories. So instead of the url looking like this:
  <strong>resources/some_category/page/2/</strong>, it's just resources/page/2. Is it possible that WP thinks "pages" is the category and that's why it's throwing a 404?</p>
  
  <p>If yes, is there a way to change <strong>/pages/2/</strong> to <strong>/p/2/</strong>, and if yes to that, is that even a good idea?</p>