Exclude categories from featured page widget

[Chris Jones]

Hi Bill, hope you are well.

I need to exclude some categories from the Featured Posts Widget I’m using on the home page. I assume widgets-post.php is where I alter the filter? Not sure the syntax.

cheers c-

[Bill Robbins]

Hello Chris,

Good question. There isn’t a built in way to exclude categories, but you can do that with a bit of editing. The file you want to change is widget-posts.php and this is the section:

		$query_args = array(
     			'post_type' => 'post',
     			'cat'       => $instance['posts_cat'],
     			'showposts' => $instance['posts_num'],
     			'orderby'   => $instance['orderby'],
     			'order'     => $instance['order'],
     		);

Those are the arguments for a wp_query instance that the widget runs. WP Query has lots of options in it (http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query). You probably want something like this:

'category__not_in' => array( 2, 6 )

which lets you exclude categories by ID. That would change the above code to something like this:

		$query_args = array(
     			'post_type' => 'post',
     			'cat'       => $instance['posts_cat'],
     			'showposts' => $instance['posts_num'],
     			'orderby'   => $instance['orderby'],
     			'order'     => $instance['order'],
     			'category__not_in' => array( 2, 6 ),
     		);

Where 2 and 6 are the ID’s of the categories you want to leave out.

See how that works for you.

Enjoy your Saturday,
Bill

[Author]

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