How Can You Exclude Categories From Your RSS Feeds?

Question

I've searched and found posts that have asked and answered how to merge different categories into an RSS feed. What I need to know is how to exclude specific categories from the RSS feed?

Specifically, I use WP to post blog articles and to post portfolio items onto my site. I want to exclude the portfolio category from appearing in the RSS feed, making only blog posts available.

Answer 1

It's been broken since 3.1, see:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16622
and also
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-31-breaks-rss-customization-via-exclude_category NOTE: Otto's suggested fix in that thread doesn't work for me.

Ticket suggests patch will go in for 3.1.1 and i can confirm that currently filters on pre_get_posts or parse_query fail for feeds(unfortunately).

Answer 2

Not too confident to get hooks right from memory... I think hooking into pre_get_posts and setting category__not_in to what you want to skip on is_feed() conditional should work.

But might require playing with different hooks earlier/later, querying internals are confusing around there.

Answer 3

function wpsites_exclude_category_rss_feed($query) {
 if ($query->is_feed) {
   $query->set('cat','-007,-008');
 }
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','wpsites_exclude_category_rss_feed');

Either of these snippets in your functions file will work using pre_get_posts

function wpsites_exclude_category_rss_feed($query) {
if ( $query->is_feed) {
    $query-> set('category__not_in',array(007));
    }
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','wpsites_exclude_category_rss_feed');