[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Need to limit category for non-widget use

Hi cerulean,

You need to use the cats_to_exclude parameter to specify which categories you wish to have excluded, like this:

<?php
if (function_exists('wpp_get_mostpopular')) wpp_get_mostpopular('stats_comments=0&range=all&order_by=comments&limit=8&cats_to_exclude=1,5,33');
?>

For a more complete list of available paramaters and its usage please go to your wp-admin > Settings > WordPress Popular Posts page.

P.S.: the order_by parameter only accepts the following values: comments, views, avg. Make sure you use the right ones or my plugin will automatically switch to the default values.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to achieve this with the current version of my plugin. You’ll have to hack through the code of my plugin to do this.

Open wordpress-popular-posts.php using an editor such as Windows’ Notepad or Adobe Dreamweaver, and change this code (around line 608):

$mostpopular = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT $wpdb->posts.ID, $wpdb->posts.post_title $fields FROM $wpdb->posts $join WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish' AND $wpdb->posts.post_password = '' AND $range $force_pv $nopages $exclude GROUP BY $wpdb->posts.ID ORDER BY $sortby DESC LIMIT " . $instance['limit'] . "");

… into this:

$mostpopular = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT $wpdb->posts.ID, $wpdb->posts.post_title $fields FROM $wpdb->posts $join WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish' AND $wpdb->posts.post_password = '' AND $range $force_pv $nopages $exclude AND $wpdb->posts.ID NOT IN(15) GROUP BY $wpdb->posts.ID ORDER BY $sortby DESC LIMIT " . $instance['limit'] . "");

… where AND $wpdb->posts.ID NOT IN(15) specifies the ID of the page(s) you want to exclude (in your case, it should be the ID of the home page).

You’re welcome! I might include a page/post excluding feature on a future release of my plugin to make this more simple and keep people from having to hack my plugin 😛

Thank you for your words!