Continuing our series on helpful WordPress plugins we use and recommend for our clients…

Advanced Category Excluder

A lot of blog themes use a post’s category to handle pages differently. You might have a category, for example, just for items that you want to show upon the home page. Your theme’s homepage PHP code would sniff out only those posts with the Home category and then display those, and only those, on the homepage. In a case like this, though, you don’t want Home showing up in a normal sidebar category list. What to do? If you’re a coder, or just a savvy WordPress user, you might use replacement Category widget provided by Widgets Reloaded (see our post on Widgets Reloaded) to exclude the Home category’s ID. But for non-coders who don’t even know how to determine a category’s ID, there’s Advanced Category Excluder. Whew!

But Advanced Category Excluder doesn’t just let you omit categories from the category list. It lets you omit categories from just about every form of item there is. You can even specify categories to be omitted from your RSS feeds. It’s glorious!

Check out the Advanced Category Excluder plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Flexi Pages, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.