I have transferred ownership and maintenance of the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin to Marios Alexandrou. I am no longer actively developing WordPress themes or plugins.
Ultimate Category Excluder (UCE – unfortunately the same abbreviation as unsolicited commercial email) is a WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly and easily exclude categories from your front page, archives, and feeds. Just select which categories you want to be excluded, and UCE does all the work for you!
Ultimate Category Excluder was originally written by Kyle Slattery of fidgeting.net.
Compatibility
I am using Ultimate Category Excluder on a blog running WordPress 3.6. You should not be running older versions of WordPress, they have serious known security problems. The current version of UCE (0.96) does not work with versions of WordPress before version 3.1. Contact me if you need an older version of UCE (but you really should upgrade your WordPress!)
Installation
- Download Ultimate Category Excluder to the plugins directory under wp-content of your blog.
- Unzip the ultimate-category-excluder.zip file.
- Activate the plugin on your plugins page.
- You can edit the options by going under “Settings” and then “Category Exclusion.”
- If you are upgrading from an older version, you need to go into your “Category Exclusion” settings, choose at least one option from the Searches column, save settings, then go back and clear that option and save again.
- (Optional) I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed so you can stay informed about any updates to Ultimate Category Excluder.
Note for Upgrading to 0.96
If you are upgrading to version 0.96, you need to choose any category to exclude from the Search column on the settings page. Then save the settings. And then go back and uncheck that category, and save the settings again.
Uninstall
- Deactivate the plugin on your plugins page.
- Delete the ultimate_category_excluder directory from your plugins directory, under wp-content of your blog directory.
History
- 1.00 – February 2016 – Ownership and maintenance of the plugin transferred to Marios Alexandrou.
- 0.96 – September 11, 2013 – Went back to the last known (no complaints at least!) version, 0.84. I know it’s been frustrating over the last few days, and I apologize for breaking web sites around the web.
- 0.94 – September 9, 2013 – It turns out that some themes process their home pages in odd ways. This resulted in UCE no longer correctly filtering out the excluded categories. This was a hard bug to figure out, as I couldn’t reproduce it on any of my sites. I think I’ve got it fixed now, but I do have a report that UCE is now causing a conflict with a separate page on the site. So I am working on that; but since this version should fix most people’s home pages, I’m releasing it while continuing to bug hunt. Thank you for your patience. Many thanks to Michael Westergaard, Alyx Hydrick, Alain Saintpo, Seth Vore, and Michael Pollock for their help in figuring out what was happening.
I also fixed several very subtle bugs that were throwing error messages behind the scenes. And I tweaked the system information section at the bottom of the UCE settings page.
Added the Danish tranlation. I don’t who to thank for providing this.
Added Brazilian translation. Thank you to Leandro Callegari Coelho.
Feel free to send me other languages if you like. - 0.91 – September 4, 2013 – You can now exclude categories from appearing in results from the built-in WordPress search engine. Other search engines (e.g. Bing, Google) may still be able to find and index your content. Also fixed a bug that excluded categories from appearing in the Post Editor. And fixed a bug in the system information section.
- 0.84 – August 3, 2013 – Fixed the show empty category listing again.
- 0.83 – August 2, 2013 – I fixed a couple of silly bugs. And added a feature to list what versions of MySQL, PHP, WordPress and UCE you are running. The first thing I ask when someone reports a bug is the version of their system software, and most of the time they have no idea.
- 0.8 – July 7, 2011 – All categories will now appear on the list of categories able to be excluded, even those categories that don’t have any posts yet.
- 0.7 – May 6, 2011 – Added internationalization (i18n) support, based on suggestion and code from Patrick Skiebe.
- 0.6 – February 24, 2011 – Addressed a bug in UCE that didn’t handle multiple excluded categories correctly.
- 0.5 – February 24, 2011 – Addressed a bug in WP 3.1.
- 0.4 – October 10, 2009 – A user pointed out a bug when trying to filter down categories in the edit posts admin area. I believe I’ve fixed this, but let me know if you still have trouble.
- 0.3 – June 20, 2009 – James Revillini pointed out a few fairly obvious bugs. I’ve incorporated his changes into the software.
- 0.21 Beta – January 10, 2008 – Initial release, fixed file name bug, dashes vs. underscores
- 0.2 Beta – December 13, 2007 – Initial release, tweaked to refer to PlanetMike.com, no functionality changed
- 0.1 Beta – February 14, 2007 – Initial release
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Seems to work fine. I really need a way to exclude categories from the WP category widget or a custom widget that only lists the desired categories. Please consider adding.
I’ve just tried and with latest WP version,it won’t work
Hi Peter,
I’ve tested UCE version 0.6 with WordPress 3.11 and it is working fine. Send me an email and we can try to figure out what the issue is with your site’s setup. Mike
You write:-
>4. You can edit the options by going under “Options” and then “Category Exclusion.”
I have WordPress 3.0.1 and plan to upgrade to 3.1.1 shortly. I have installed your plugin, Ultimate Category Excluder 0.6.
I do not see the “Options” that you refer to. Is this because WordPress 3.0.1 just will not do and I really need to upgrade, or am I being real dumb and not looking properly?
Thanks.
Hi James,
You’re right, my documentation should say “going under ‘Settings’ and then ‘Category Exclusion.'” I apologize for the confusion.
Be aware that version 0.6 may not work under WordPress 3.0.x because of some internal changes that were made to WordPress with the 3.1 release.
Oh heck! I appreciate that names of things change but really – how did I miss that? Doh. I will see if i get any joy with that but will bear in mind that I may need to upgrade to WordPress 3.1.1.
UCE did not work with my installation of WordPress 3.0.1. I upgraded to WordPress 3.1.1 and it appears to work.
Here’s a thought: What would it take to implement an Ultimate Category INCLUDER? – i.e. the logical complement of the UCE, such that you specify those Categories that you want to be listed.
Now that would be really neat.
I’m glad that you were able to upgrade to 3.1.1, and that UCE works for you.
Regarding a plugin along the lines of “Ultimate Category INCLUDER” It’s not really needed as by default all categories are included. I’m pretty sure to get it to work you’d have to exclude all categories, then choose the ones to keep. And since exclusions and then inclusions are very wide in scope, you’d run into major headaches on archive pages, your feed, and I’d guess even the home page.
UCE almost works for my purpose, which is to be able to host a private “working group” on my blog without our posts appearing anywhere, especially not on the RSS feeds.
There’s just one big problem (in WP 3.1, at least) with using UCE for this purpose — while the posts don’t appear on the RSS feeds, the comments to the posts do. I looked at the code, but it’s beyond my capability to figure out what needs to be tweaked. Could anyone get me pointed in the right direction on this?
Thanks!
Thanks for this plugin! It works fine for me, but the only thing that I found is that if I exclude a category from the archives, I cannot see the posts if I’m in the actual category.
For example, I excluded the category “Category1” from my Main Page, Feeds, and Archives. I have “Post1” and “Post2” under “Category1”. This removes them from all of those. But when I go to http://mydomain.com/category/category1 (using permalinks) it says that no results were found. I would still need to be able to go directly to that category, but not want the posts in the general archives (http://mydomain.com/2011/04 for example).
Thank you!
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
WordPress handles date-based archives the same way as the category-named archives. So if you check “archives” your posts will be hidden in both date and category archives. It may be possible to set up a custom function that would work only on posts in the date archives, but I haven’t looked at that in detail. Mike
Oh okay. Well that sucks! Hopefully there’ll be a way to do that in the future. Thanks for the quick response! 🙂
Does this work with 3.1.2 version of wordpress?
Good morning John, Yes, UCE works with WordPress version 3.1.2. I’ve updated this page to reflect that. Thanks for asking.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the good work on the plugin.
A problem I am having is that if I was using your plugin to exclude a category of posts from my RSS & archives that are just outbound links to interesting articles on the web. I display that category using a query_posts call. However, if using your plugin I have excluded that category from the archives, the query_posts returns no articles. I am pretty sure this used to work fine. Is this the expected behaviour?
Thanks.
Hi Carlos, What you’re seeing could be a result of system upgrade to version 3.1 of WordPress where category handling was tweaked. You might check the docs at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts for WP_Query, that might help you work around the problem. Mike
When I activated this I got an instant 500 – Internal Server Error
Hi Dude, I’m sorry you had trouble. What version of WordPress are you running? 3.12? Where did you download it from? What version of PHP, apache, mysql are you running. What other plugins do you have installed? What theme are you using? Email me the details and we’ll figure it out.
Hi Mike, could I get that older version of UCE for wordpress 3.1.1?
Good morning Lauren, Version 0.6 and 0.7 both work on WordPress 3.1.1. They can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-category-excluder/download/
Hi! I installed the plugin today and at first it looks fine. Than I added another category (the one I wanted to exclude later) to WP, but the category list inside the Plugin does not update. I even tried to force a reload by deaktivateing and activating the plugin. Just wondering if this is a bug or (strange) feature and how to get the new category excluded now? (WP is 3.1.3 German)
Also for the “to-do” it might be beautiful to have the categories listet among its subcategories. Would make it easyer to not forget one to exclude 🙂
Thanks for your help! hinnerk
Hinnerk, A category will only show up on the list if there is at least one post in it. Maybe create a new post, assign the category, then save a draft instead of publishing the post. Let me know if that works or not. Mike
Got it, thanks!
I published the article and the category showed in the list. After changing the article back to draft it’s still there. I wanted to avoid publishing because my feed is published on other sites and I dont want this certain category to appear on them. (I have no way to get it out of their database once they have fetched it :-)) So even if it’s only for a second in my feed Mr. Murphy will clap hands to be right again when the other partie pulls exactly at that moment :-/ – So it’s a small issue only affecting a few people but maybe worth a change.
Besides that all seems to work great!
correction: after putting the article back to “draft” some minutes later the category dissapeard again.
If I remember correctly, it’s all in the way that categories are presented to the system. It’s been a while since I played with that. The solution would be to post a “Testing” or “ignore this” post to that category, go the UCE’s settings and hide the category, then delete the post after you have a “real” post in that category. Sorry it is convoluted.
HI
I installed the plug in on 3.2 and I created a category
going on the uce preference the category doesn appears on the list
why?
thanks
Hi Gigi, A category will not appear on the list of the “Category Exclusion” preferences until there is at least one post in that category. So simply add a post to that category, and you should be all set. Mike
Hi Mike
Using UCE on my we sited using WP 3.2 and it is running good with no know issues, Thais for a great WP Plugin.
Peter
i’m using WordPress 3.2.1 and UCE0.8. but i can’t exclude any category.
Harry, You need to give a few specific details. Does the list of categories show up blank? When you check a checkbox, does it save your choices? Are you getting any error messages? What version of MySQL and PHP is your system running?
Hi Michale, thanks for your reply. I found that UCE only hide the post, not the category. That means after I check the category and save it, the category is still shown up, but the posts are none.
Harry, Do you mean the list of categories using the Categories widget? If so, yes, the categories widget builds the list of categories in a way that can’t easily be filtered. You’d need to build your category list by hand, or by tweaking your theme code and excluding category names as a parameter.
I see. Thanks a lot.
What about an option to exclude a category from search results as well? Just a thought it might be a useful addition to what is already a great plugin! Thanks…
Dan, I don’t know how possible that is, I’ve never looked at the functionality options of WordPress’ search feature. Plus people could still use Google or Yahoo to search your site, so it wouldn’t really make a lot of difference if you’re trying to keep posts hidden.
If it’s possible to do, I second the notion for the ability to exclude from Search. I have posts that are not private/hidden, but there’s a specific page I want them to be pulled up from, and I’ll also be doing “compilation posts” that link to them. Having Google pull up those individual posts is fine, but having the single posts and the compiled posts both show up in an internal search is a little redundant in my case.
This plugin, as well as the alternative Simply Exclude plugin, doesn’t work when WPeCommerce is installed. Somehow WPeCommerce overrides the exclusion of categories from the frontpage, feeds, etc.
This is a pity as I need both a store and category exclusion on my site.
Any ideas on what’s wrong or how to fix it? I tried to get help on the WPeCommerce forums, but haven’t got any replies.
BTW: maybe you should merge your plugin with the Simply Exclude plugin? They do exactly the same thing.
audunmb: Thanks for letting me know about the incompatability with WPeCommerce. I’ll check it out. On a very quick look at that plugin, it appears that WPeCommerce overrides all of WordPress’ built in category handling. So it may not be possible to use the two plugins on the same site. Maybe have a separate install for your store, that way your product categories won’t show up on your blog.
Why should Ultimate Category Excluder merge with Simply Exclude? Why should Simply Exclude merge with Ultimate Category Excluder? Nothing is broken in my plugin, I assume there are no problems with Simply Exclude. It’s not hurting anything by having two different plugins that have similar functionality.
Thanks! If WPeCommerce overrides normal category handling I suppose there isn’t much you can do. Maybe the separate install is the way to go for me.
Merging was just a suggestion, both plugins work fine.
audunmb wrote:-
” I need both a store and category exclusion on my site.”
For one client I have built an ecommerce website based on the Market Theme and with this Ultimate Category Excluder plugin.
It works well.
thanks for this plug in.
I use it and it work fine. But in front page colum, I have Widget for recent post and when i exclude catagory from UCE it exclude also from the list of recent post on this plugin.
How i can fix it ?
thanks
jonakangou, I think that’s a function of the way widgets work. You’d probably need to set up a custom widget instead of the default widget that comes with WordPress.
If i use the default wordpress widget for recent post it exclude post from category exclude in plugin.
i find a widget that do this without exclude catagory even i use UCE :
Latest News Widget
Other question :
I create some custom taximonie how i can include it on the list of category in admin mode of plugin ?
UCE is a realy nice Plugin, but I have the same Problem with custom Taxonomie as jonakangou. Any solution for this?
brilliant plugin
this works fantastically and remover the category requires but 1 small thing if you look at a post in another category there is a link to the next post the category is not excluded from this dont know how to do it but not too important mybe you can do it in a update or add it to the options available
Thanks for saving me days of searching and trial and error