Show one category on index.php

Thanks for the info, TG! I followed your advice and changed my index.php as per the instructions in this thread, so I no longer have the redirection.
Felipe, I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to do… you’re trying to show only some cat=1 posts? Or you don’t want cat=1 posts to show up at all? In the first case, I’ve no idea what to do, in the second, just change the $cat=1 to the actual category you wish to show. If this has nothing to do with your problem, sorry!

The problem I found with the above hack/mod is that once you press “next page” to go to page 2 of the listings, it ceases to work. At least in my case it did. I was attempting to display all entries except those from a single category on the main listings. It would correct display messages on the main index.php page, but once you went to index.php?paged=2, the count was thrown off because it now factored in the messages that I did not want to be displayed.
Fortunately a solution was easy. Instead of:
if (‘/’ == $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] || ‘/index.php’ == $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])
I used:
if (‘/’ == $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] || ‘/index.php’ == $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] || strstr($_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’],’/index.php?paged=’))
… and that appears to have solved all my troubles. This is particularly useful when using the pictpress plugin, as it creates extra messages for every picture it sticks in the gallery message. I put all the extra messages in a dummy category, and can now avoid them cluttering up the count on my displays.

If you’re using 1.3, you can try this plugin:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Front Page Categories
Version: 0.1
Plugin URI: http://wordpress.org/#
Description: Select categories to display on the front page.
Author: Ryan Boren
*/

function fpc_front_page_cats($query_string) {
// Change this to the categories you want to show on the front page.
$cats_to_show = '1 2 3';
$query = new WP_Query();
$query->parse_query($query_string);
if ($query->is_home) {
if (! empty($query_string)) {
$query_string .= '&';
}
$query_string .= "cat=$cats_to_show";
}
return $query_string;
}
add_filter('query_string', 'fpc_front_page_cats');
?>

@davejenbarnes – see if this would be of any use to you:
StaticEez Plugin
TG

I can’t believe that there’s no easy way to do this. Seems VERY basic if you ask me.
Has anyone come up with a way to do this?? Geez.
Running 1.3 here.

Ok, one thing you may be running in to is that wp-blog-header.php (see top of your index.php), when it sees a set $cat=#, makes the assumption that you also want all the children of the specified category too (if they exist of course), even if you don’t. This was my case, so I did the following:
First, I wanted the index.php page to always insept with a certain set of posts so I ended up with this line after at the very beginning of index.php:: if (! isset($_GET[cat])) {$cat=6; $numberposts=9; $orderby="category"; $order="ASC"; $fetchkids=0;}
Next, the following code changes were made to wordpres/wp-blog-header.php
An aside thing to know is that 1.2.1 at least ‘allows’ only orderby= on 'author','date','category','title'
I also added a consumable variable called ‘fetchkids’ at the end of $wpvarstoreset array at line 51. Then at line 264 the code changes to:

if (! isset($fetchkids) || $fetchkids) {
$whichcat .= get_category_children($cat_array[0], ' '.$andor.' category_id '.$eq.' ');
for ($i = 1; $i < (count($cat_array)); $i = $i + 1) {
$whichcat .= ' '.$andor.' category_id '.$eq.' '.intval($cat_array[$i]);
$whichcat .= get_category_children($cat_array[$i], ' '.$andor.' category_id '.$eq.' ');
}
}

So, by setting $fetchkids to FALSE (0) above, and adding the code, I effectively broke out of the bit that would end up fetching all the children posts of my parent category.
Yes, it’s a hack but no less elegant than the convention I see in place w/in wordpress/wp-blog-header.php;

Can this plug-in be used on any other page besides index.php?
for example a sub page, called books.php?