WooCommerce taxonomy slug change - woocommerce

Question

For some reason after the latest update of WooCommerce, my taxonomy slugs have changed.
They've gone from:
www.mysite.com/genre/dance to www.mysite.com/pa_genre/dance
It may be that in the backend nothing has changed, but the visualization on the frontend has. This sudden change in URL's is affecting not only how my site is linked internally, but also externally and if not fixed rapidly Google will also pick up these 404 pages.
I've looked into WooCommerce files, not sure where to look, but wc-attribute-functions.php shows the following containing references to the 'pa_' bit.
If anyone has an idea to go back to my old URL structure, that would be greatly appreciated.
/**
* Get a product attributes name.
*
* #param mixed $name
* #return string
*/
function wc_attribute_taxonomy_name( $name ) {
return 'pa_' . wc_sanitize_taxonomy_name( $name );
}
/**
* Get a product attributes label.
*
* #param mixed $name
* #return string
*/
function wc_attribute_label( $name ) {
global $wpdb;
if ( taxonomy_is_product_attribute( $name ) ) {
$name = wc_sanitize_taxonomy_name( str_replace( 'pa_', '', $name ) );
$label = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT attribute_label FROM {$wpdb->prefix}woocommerce_attribute_taxonomies WHERE attribute_name = %s;", $name ) );
if ( ! $label ) {
$label = ucfirst( $name );
}
} else {
$label = ucwords( str_replace( '-', ' ', $name ) );
}
return apply_filters( 'woocommerce_attribute_label', $label, $name );
}
/**
* Get a product attributes orderby setting.
*
* #param mixed $name
* #return string
*/
function wc_attribute_orderby( $name ) {
global $wpdb;
$name = str_replace( 'pa_', '', sanitize_title( $name ) );
$orderby = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT attribute_orderby FROM " . $wpdb->prefix . "woocommerce_attribute_taxonomies WHERE attribute_name = %s;", $name ) );
return apply_filters( 'woocommerce_attribute_orderby', $orderby, $name );
}

Answer 1

I've had the same problem after Woocommerce 2.3.5 update, a quick fix would be adding a rewrite rule for the attributes.
You can add this to functions.php file in your theme:
add_action('init', 'add_genre_url');
function add_genre_url()
{
add_rewrite_rule(
'^genre/([^/]*)$',
'index.php?pa_genre=$matches[1]',
'top'
);
//flush_rewrite_rules();
}
The flush_rewrite_rules() function must be called at least once after you add the rewrite rule, it's not a great idea to leave it on the init action for performance reasons. Maybe someone can clear this out.