CUNY Academic Commons

Just found this ticket that appears to be unattached to a milestone. Can you follow up with details when you get a chance, Matt? Or if it's no longer an issue, can we close this ticket?

Yeah -- wow -- that was a pretty poor ticket, huh?

I just tested the "Front Page Category" plugin, and it does not appear to be working to me. When one activates the plugin and selects certain categories that should not appear on the front page, they show up there anyway through the categories widget. Maybe doing something wrong?

Here's a blog on which it is active:

http://testblog.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

I have created a test blog in my local dev env with multiple categories and a single post in each.

@matt, I believe you are misunderstanding how this plugin works. It DOES NOT exclude categories from the Categories Widget. It excludes POSTS from being displayed in the chronological list of posts in the main content area. For example, I created five categories with one post in each category. When I load the home page of my test blog I can see all five categories in the categories widget AND all five recent posts in the main content area. Then I enabled the Front Page Categories plugin and in its settings I set it to show ONLY categories one, two and five. When I reload the test blog's home page the main content area only displays the posts from those three categories. The posts from categories three and four are not displayed (again in the main content area). The categories widget is not affected by this plugin, it continues to display all five categories no matter what the settings of the Front Page Categories plugin are set to. I've attached a screenshot so you can see what I'm seeing.

There is no error or issue with this plugin. I reviewed the code and all it does is look at its database settings and then attaches an action to the 'pre_get_posts' hook that is called when WordPress runs the loop to output posts.

I believe this issue should be closed, as it is not an error and there is nothing to be "fixed".

Thanks, Dom -- that's really helpful. Can you do a quick check to see whether there is a plugin out there that does affect the category widget? I know I've used one on WordPress that did this before (and I thought it was this one), but that may have been five or six years ago.

I don't have a problem with the snippet you linked to, Dom, but I would rather not have it in an mu-plugin so that everyone sees it. There are already a lot of widgets on the screen; adding another one that does something almost exactly like the built-in Categories widget will make things worse. (Also, the UI of having to enter comma-separated category IDs is a bit cumbersome.)

The following two options seems like the most viable routes:
1) Wrap the new widget stuff in a plugin wrapper, and allow users like Matt to activate it on their own blogs.
2) Deregister the WP core Categories widget and add our own version of that widget, which adds the ability to exclude categories.

In a perfect world, (2) would be cool, but it will take probably 10x the dev time as (1), and this seems to me to be a relatively unimportant issue in the grand schema of things. So I lean toward (1).

Great catch, Dom -- many thanks. I think that AVH Extended Categories does provide the functionality I was looking for (not that I can remember why I was looking for it after all this time. I vaguely remember that this ticket was instigated by a user query). At any rate, I'll close the ticket now, as this appears to be a non-issue on more than one level.