Sridhar Katakam

Genesis and WordPress Tutorials

How to exclude Posts from a specific Category on the Posts page in WordPress

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Looking to have posts from a particular category or categories not appear on your WordPress Blog?

Whether you have the list of posts appearing on the homepage or on a separate Posts page (something like this), pre_get_posts filter hook in WordPress can be used to alter the query on non-singular pages such as the Posts page.

Adding the following code at the end of child theme’s functions.php will exclude posts from category whose ID is 1 to not appear on the Posts page:

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'sk_exclude_category_posts' );
/**
 * Excludes posts from "Uncategoized" category on the Posts page.
 *
 * @param object $query data.
 */
function sk_exclude_category_posts( $query ) {

    if ( $query->is_main_query() && ! is_admin() && $query->is_home() ) {
        $query->set( 'cat', '-1' );
    }

}

Replace 1 with the ID of your category. This can be obtained by clicking on the category name at Posts > Categories and observing the value of tag_ID in the URL.

Ex.:

Sample URL:

https://genesis-sample.test/wp-admin/term.php?taxonomy=category&tag_ID=1&post_type=post&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fedit-tags.php%3Ftaxonomy%3Dcategory

What if you want to exclude posts from multiple categories?

Use this sample code:

add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'sk_exclude_category_posts' );
/**
 * Excludes posts from "Uncategoized" and "Featured" categories on the Posts page.
 *
 * @param object $query data.
 */
function sk_exclude_category_posts( $query ) {

    if ( $query->is_main_query() && ! is_admin() && $query->is_home() ) {
        $query->set( 'cat', '-1, -36' );
    }

}

Replace 1 and 36 in $query->set( 'cat', '-1, -36' ); with the IDs of categories from which posts should not be shown.

References:

http://www.billerickson.net/customize-the-wordpress-query/

https://gist.github.com/luetkemj/2023628

https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/pre_get_posts

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