Query Posts Exclude Entire Category

Question

I am using the standard wordpress loop that looks like:

    <?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
        <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
    <?php endwhile; else: ?>
        <h2>We're sorry...there is no content.</h2>
    <?php endif; ?>

Then, what I wanted to do was exclude a certain category from my query, so my code became:

    <?php 
        $parent = get_cat_ID("Sports");
        query_posts("cat=-".$parent); 
    ?>
        <?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
            <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
        <?php endwhile; else: ?>
            <h2>We're sorry...there is no content.</h2>
        <?php endif; ?>
    <?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

Which I thought was right on the money...

So I did some research and discovered this is only excluding the category, not the category and it's subcategories. Is there a way to exclude a specific category and all it's subcategories from the loop?

Thanks, Josh

Answer 1

I recommend you use the pre_get_posts filter or ditch query_posts and use WP Query.

That way you can easily use category__not_in (array) parameter and not mess any other loops up.

function exclude_category($query) {

// this requires term id instead of term name so change "20" to the "sport" id
// this assumes "sports" is in a category and not a custom taxonomy
$child_cats = (array) get_term_children('20', 'category');

//only effect main home page query 
if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
$query->set('category__not_in',array_merge(array('20'), $child_cats));
return $query;
}
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

ps. I did not test this but in theory it should work.

Answer 2

This should help you:

Get the children of the parent category

Read all the sub-categories of the parent, loop over the result to get the IDs of them all and then include all IDs in the query_posts() call.

For example (not tested):

$parent = get_cat_ID("Sports");
$kids = get_categories( array( 'parent' => $parent ) );
$a = array( $parent );
foreach ( $kids as $kid )
{
  $a[] = $kid->ID;
}

query_posts( "cat=-" . implode( ",", $a ) );