How to Exclude a Category From the Sidebar List in WordPress
My portfolio page is created using posts and is not a static page like the About page. I did this to easily add and remove entries and so that the page didn’t become too large. It will display a set number of entries like any other blog post page.
The portfolio entries are in the category, portfolio. The code on the portfolio is set to only display that category.
I also use the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin so that the category does not display in my archives or in my rss feed. I’m hoping to spend some time on code based solution for that as well.
I realized that the Portfolio category was still showing up in the list of categories in the sidebar. I was using the Category Widget, because it’s easy, even though I’m not a big fan of widgets. The only way I could determine to exclude the category from the widget was by editing wp-includes/widget.php. For a brief moment that seemed like a really good idea. But every time I upgrade WordPress I would overwrite that file or I would have to save and redo my edits. So, not such a great idea after all.
Instead I used the list categories function and excluded the category that I didn’t want displayed. Here’s what I did:
- In Manage > Categories I hovered over the name of the category and got the id number that I wanted to exclude in the browser status bar. In this instance the number is 276.
http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=276
- In Design > Widgets I removed the Category Widget and added a Text one.
- In the new text widget, I gave it the title Categories and added the following code:
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=name&exclude=276&title_li='); ?> - If you want to exclude multiple categories, put a comma between each ID number.
- If you don’t have a widgetized sidebar, you can add the code to your sidebar where your current archive code is located.
That’s all there is to it. I don’t know why it took me so long to notice it was in the list. I also don’t know why I was being a dunce about the solution; it’s very similar to excluding a page from the navigation bar.
Useful? Do you have a need for this? Do you think you will use it?
photo credit: felinebird
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29 Responses to “How to Exclude a Category From the Sidebar List in WordPress”
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November 28, 2008 at 9:22 am
Hey Kim, thanks for this tip. I always wondered and wished I could eliminate certain categories on different pages, felt like so much repetition. I knew there must be a way. Glad you did the work for me!
Toodles,
Dee
Dee Langdon - BloggerNewbie´s last blog post - The Elusive Comment
November 28, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Hi Kim - I wish I’d known about this before I changed my blog theme. I wanted to have more categories, but they wouldn’t all fit in the category section above my header. I would definitely try your suggestion when I have more time, as it will take me forever to re-categorise over 500 posts.
November 28, 2008 at 4:19 pm
can’t think of a place in my blog where this can be useful, but your detailed step-by-step procedure will surely be useful some day!
Raju´s last blog post - Send Free SMS to India, UK and Other Countries
November 28, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Kim
Is there a way to arrange the categories in the order you choose rather than abc?
Dee Langdon - BloggerNewbie´s last blog post - 8 Writing Tips
November 28, 2008 at 4:32 pm
@Dee - Great! I’m always happy when I write about something someone actually wants to know :-)
There are three parameters for orderby
name - alphabetical
ID - the categories ID number
count - the number of posts in that category
Not sure if any of those will do what you need but there the only ones that can be used.
@Cath - Bummer. Categories can be bulk edited via the database but that takes some knowledge of mysql. I had a site where I converted all the categories to tags not knowing that would wipe out all of the categories. It was about 3000 posts at the time - wasn’t pretty.
@Raju - File it away :-)
November 28, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Thanks Kim. Useful, as always.
November 28, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Grrr. This is something that I really needed to know about 3 months ago. I hate it when things like this happen.
Great information though.
Wesley´s last blog post - It rained today.
November 28, 2008 at 10:14 pm
@Vered - Thank you :-)
@Wesley - Sorry :( I didn’t know you 3 months ago.
November 29, 2008 at 7:20 am
I just got to know that your blog is listed on wordpress.alltop.com. Awesome Kim!!
Raju´s last blog post - Send Free SMS to India, UK and Other Countries
November 29, 2008 at 7:40 am
@Raju - Thank you. It’s only been listed for about 5 days.
November 29, 2008 at 10:51 am
to me this is not useful since i don’t have many categories… as for the ordering the only thing i can think of is a small code snippet that would allow you to list which categories you want to show…
stratosg´s last blog post - Delete post revisions without any plugin
November 29, 2008 at 2:56 pm
@Stratos - Normally I wouldn’t need this either but I didn’t want my portfolio category listed on the front page. Some people’s themes list categories as navigation in the header - in that instance excluding categories could be really useful.
November 29, 2008 at 11:32 pm
These tips really help especially somebody like me who go into the code and hack to hide or display stuff. I did it with the page hiding until I read your tip the other day.
One of the other issues (in fact a limitation with WP, at least till 2.5.2) I have is the ordering of the pages. Is it already improved in WP latest versions. I have about 9 pages (off which some are hidden) and everytime I want to sequence it, I have to edit all of them to change a priority number.
Another pain with sequencing is that of the categories which WP defaults to alphabettic order.
I guess, they are least bothered about this aspect, release after release :lol:
Ajith Edassery´s last blog post - Free blogging platforms - Blogger v/s Wordpress.com Comparison
May 31, 2009 at 10:25 am
I remembered your post and implemented this category exclusion logic after referring this post again :) Right now, I am hiding as many as 5 categories from the sidebar widget to make room for the AdSense block that follows
June 1, 2009 at 6:18 am
Hi Ajith - Great! I’m so glad the article was helpful.
November 30, 2008 at 12:08 am
Now don’t go calling yourself a Dunce, at least you were able to work it out. A lot of people would have given up. Good on you for persevering and getting the job done.
Sire´s last blog post - ProBlogger Plea To Amazon Associates Program
November 30, 2008 at 8:22 am
@Ajith - I’m glad the tip helped you out. The ordering of pages and categories is very limiting. Oh - and I know what you mean about the sequencing of pages - that little box where you put 0,1,2 etc. I worked on one theme where that wouldn’t work - it was very annoying,
@Sire - I don’t really think I’m a dunce ;-) I’m just a big fan of self-deprecation.
December 2, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Nice tip Kim. Do you know any plugins for managing the categories on a blog. I am thinking of deleting and modifying some categories on my blog.
Madhur Kapoor´s last blog post - Manage Bookmarks Visually with Tidy Favorites
December 2, 2008 at 1:30 pm
@Madhur - Thanks! I don’t know of a plugin for that - that topic seems to be coming up a lot lately too.
Can you go to Manage > Categories click on the name of the category and then rename it? I did that with some of mine recently. If you don’t have too many categories it shouldn’t take too long. You can also bulk delete from
Manage > Categories too.
January 15, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Thanks Kim!
I was have problems with Categories not showing up correctly in arthemia theme and this solved on how to display the 5 categories in the browse categories and i the order I choose
thanks again!
January 15, 2009 at 9:28 pm
@holybagel - Thank you for visiting and commenting. I’m glad the code worked for you :-)
January 19, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Thank you so much for this,
I was searching for hours only to find useless and waaaaaay to complicated instructions, figures it would be this easy so I’m glad I found this. Keep up the good work!!
January 19, 2009 at 4:51 pm
@Jason - Thank you for visiting and commenting.
Sorry you spent so much time searching - I’ve done the same thing. When I suddenly get that aha moment and have a mental breakthrough I write it up and share it with others.
January 28, 2009 at 6:17 am
Thank you very much for this! I’m having to use wordpress for a client in a way I haven’t done before, which means a lot of hard coding in order to be able to edit specific styled regions of the homepage, I’m using posts so that the client can change the text without touching the code. Because those posts aren’t part of the blog I needed to exclude them from the sidebars.
Your tutorial was a big help!
January 28, 2009 at 1:26 pm
@Michelle - Thank you for visiting and commenting. I’m really glad that this article is helping you exclude the content :-)
April 7, 2009 at 10:34 am
I’ve just upgraded to 2.7.1, and it broke my hide-categories plugin. I couldn’t get your tip to work. The php included in a text widget would not execute. I found this Sidebar PHP Code Widget Plugin that did the trick. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/php-code-widget/
Robert Reed´s last blog post - Vero Beach
April 8, 2009 at 8:06 am
Hi Robert - You need a plugin like exec-php to run php code in posts, pages and text widgets. I should have mentioned it in the article - I often forget to mention it because I use that plugin on all my sites.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/
I’m glad you found a plugin that worked for you.
May 11, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Thanks for the tip! The php code widget did the trick to make this work.
Mark Powell´s last blog post - Geo & Real Estate Domain Sales Report - April 2009
May 12, 2009 at 6:47 am
Hi Mark - Great! I’m glad it worked out for you.