Display top posts within specific categories or sub-categories?

FYI, here is a simple change that does offer this functionality, though I really don’t want to be modifying this plugin’s code since it will cause update problems. But in case someone else has this problem, or the plugin author is reading this and is interested in suggestions, here is an option:

In file top-10.php, line 408, change it from:

$p_in_c = (in_array($cat->cat_ID, $exclude_categories)) ? true : false;

to:

$p_in_c = (in_array($cat->cat_ID, $exclude_categories) || in_array($cat->parent, $exclude_categories)) ? true : false;

Yup, correct. in_array($cat->parent, $exclude_categories) checks to see if the category’s parent is listed in the exclude_categories array.

This wouldn’t go any higher up the category hierarchy though. For instance, if someone had 3 or more levels of child categories, doing this would only climb up one level.

If you would like to offer the ability to exclude an entire parent category and all of its children, you could look into using the custom post_is_in_descendant_category function listed in the WP Codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/in_category#Testing_if_a_post_is_in_a_descendant_category

And thanks for putting out such a great plugin too!

Thanks! If at all possible, I would love to see this in the next release 😉

In any case, I’ll mark this topic as resolved.