Homepage custom recent news

Question

Is there anyway of telling wordpress, by some plugin or whatever, not to show Recent news from Category X, on my home page?

Or I may do it only by modifying the home.php code?

Answer 1

Assuming this is the default main query, see the example for pre_get_posts, which shows how to exclude a category from the main query:

function wpa78465_exclude_category( $query ) {
    if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
        $query->set( 'cat', '-1,-1347' ); // IDs of categories to exclude
    }
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'wpa78465_exclude_category' );