How to setup blog page to render blog posts minus afew categories

Question

I have set my home page to use a static template. So I created a Blog page to use a blog template to render my blog posts. The problem is it just renders the page content. I want it to render blog posts. Minus that of category "portfolio" & "WIP". Do I need to create a custom query_posts? what might it look like. To simulate what I get by default if my home page is set to latest posts. I will also need pagination to work.

Answer 1

if you want to exclude categories then you do need to create a custom query something like this:

$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;    
query_posts( array( 'category__not_in' => array( 2, 6 ) , 'paged' => $page ) );

just above the loop and change 2 , 6 to the category ids which you want to exclude , and to help keep pagination i would add wp_reset_query(); just after the loop to save later problems.

keep in mind that this is probably the simplest form of the query_post you need but if you want more out of its power take a look at the codex.

Hope This Helps