If you have a self-hosted WordPress site with a blog-type theme ~ the one which displays your posts in the frontpage in column and by date formats (like this site) ~ the easiest way to hide in your frontpage posts under certain categories is to use “category excluder” plugins.
(The image on this post uses a Newspaper layout which already has functions to select (and exclude) categories to show on the front page. The theme used by The Filipino Australian no longer requires category excluders as discussed on this post.)
Some of these plugins also have the functionality of excluding or hiding posts not only from your frontpage but also in archives and search pages. Some even allow you to exclude selected posts under certain tags, and even from your feeds.
Enter “categories exclude” or similar terms when you perform a search of these plugins in your “Install Plugins” window and you will be presented with a list of these plugins.
We have tested some of the plugins available in WordPress.org and below are four of the plugins which we like best as they are very functional and robust, and they produce the results we wanted. Note that, strictly speaking, plugins 3 and 4 are not “category excluder”, but I included them here as I found them also quite interesting.
1. Simply Exclude by Paul Menard
The plugin provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags, authors and pages from the 4 actions used by WordPress in your blog’s front page, archives, feeds, and search page. It can also be used to hide posts under certain tags.
2. Ultimate Category Excluder by Planet Mike
Ultimate Category Excluder excludes/hides posts under certain categories from your front page, archives, and feeds. Like Simply Exclude, it comes with an admin panel where you can toggle off/on categories to be excluded.
3. Category Selection Widget by Zack Design
Strictly, not a category excluder plugin but this plugin is excellent, especially for websites with multiple categories and sub-categories selection on their front page or on the sidebar. It gives additional functionality to your blog’s native WordPress “search engine” by giving you the ability to provide your users with multiple dropdowns. Very useful for blogs with lots of posts and sub-categories like websites of real estate agents where selection of posts can be based on subcategories like price range, location, number of bedrooms, etc.
4. Collapsing Categories by Robert Felty
Collapsing Categories creates an expandable list of categories and subcategories. It can also expand to show posts.
You can see a demo of this plugin on our sidebar TOPICS / POSTS.
In case you’re wondering: I am not promoting the plugins based on affiliate program-related considerations. I just wanted to share with you the results of my tests. The links above are affiliate links-free which you can easily find out by simply hovering your mouse on the links to see if they contain affiliate ids.
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WP.org-focused articles will commence soon
Going over the topics related to WP.com blogs we have covered so far, it would seem that we would have covered most of the main concerns of our WP.com bloggers. We will be posting new articles, albeit short, on this site relating to WP.org blogs or the so-called self-hosted WordPress blogs to address queries hitting our mailbox.
That said, we would still be covering topics related to WP.com blogs but we would first pass it through our WP.com page before re-posting them here. That way, we would be able to sort out any issues with the WordPress.com developers before getting them bedded on this site.