Thread

I feel like this is an “EE 101” type of question, but I just want to make sure I understand this.

Let’s say that I have a site that contains multiple weblogs, with many categories (the same category group is used by all of the weblogs).  For a particular template, I want to exclude all entries that belong to category ID #15.

So I set up my {exp:weblog:entries} tag like so:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="foo|bar" limit="15" category="not 15"}

...

{/exp:weblog:entries}

To my mind, this should exclude all entries that have been assigned to category #15—they shouldn’t appear on that particular template at all.

However, I find that this is not the case.  What I find is that if entries have been assigned to category #15 in addition to other categories, they appear.  The only entries that don’t appear on this template are those that have only been assigned to category #15—they only have one category assignment.

So my question is this.  How can one exclude articles that have been assigned to a particular category, regardless of whether or not they have been assigned to other categories? To use the example above, how can I exclude all entries in category #15—even if they have multiple category assignments?

Well, it’s tedious, but the one method which looks like it should work would be something like:

category="not 15&1|15&2|15&3"

... and so on.

Or maybe there’s a way with conditionals inside the weblog tag?

Alas, that didn’t work either.

I think the way that I’m going to have to do it is via conditionals within the {exp:weblog:entries} tag, and use CSS to hide the entries that meet the necessary criteria.  It’s not optimal, but I guess it’ll have to work for now.

Bummer. 

I guess what you describe would work, although the entries would still show up in the source code. 

Maybe a custom status for all articles with category 15?  It’s an extra step to remember when publishing, but you could definitely grab that as a parameter to exclude those articles.

I suppose there’s probably a way around it with a query, but it seems like every time I try a query these days, it makes my head spin and I end up crawling to Derek for help.  Would something like this be a start?

Now that I look back, I guess the docs don’t show an example where you can use “not”, “|” and “&” all at the same time.  It seems to be a logical extension of the current parameter possibilities, though, so I could see this being a good feature request.

I’ve thought about using a custom query—thought I prefer not to if I don’t have to.  I might revisit the custom query idea once I’ve got some other issues with the site in question hammered out.