How do I remove a category from a wordpress loop>

Question

I have a question. I need to have, in my archive.php file, a exclusion of a specific category. given what I have now, how would I make that happen?

Here is the code:

    <?php 
        query_posts(array(
            'post_type' => 'post',
            'showposts' => 5
        ) );
    ?>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
        <div class="blogcontentlinks">
            <a style="text-decoration:none;" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2></a>
            <p style="">Posted on <?php the_time('m/j/y g:i A') ?><br />Categories: <?php the_category(' ') ?><br />Tags: <?php the_tags(' ') ?></p>
            <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
        </div>
    <?php endwhile;?>

Thank you

Answer 1

You can add category id or category slug into arguments you are passing to query_posts:

<?php
    // category slug ('products')
    query_posts(array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'showposts' => 5,
        'category_name' => 'products'
    ) );
?>

or

<?php
    // category id ('3')
    query_posts(array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'showposts' => 5,
        'cat' => '3'
    ) );
?>

In the second case you can use comma separated list of category ids like 'cat' => '3,5,7'.

Answer 2

Try this before the loop

<?php query_posts('cat=-[ID]'); ?>

The cat=-[ID] parameter. "-ID" in this case is the ID of the category, and you can replace that with any category you wish to remove from the loop. You may use comma separated values here to remove more than one category (e.g. cat=-1,-2 etc)