‘RYO Just One Category’ Plugin: Take Subcategory Posts out of Category pages

RYO Just One Category Plugin makes sense for many of use who use WordPress.

I thought it was bad form to have a category page that included subcategories. With all that, it was a mess.

After all, subcategories get their own page! Those posts don't need to be in both places!

So I needed to filter out subcategories.

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And I couldn't just filter them out of archive.php ... that disturbed the number of posts per page, sometimes leaving continuation pages with nothing on them! We needed to change the query.

This plugin solved the problem for me; I hope it helps you, too.

It works great with the Category Visibility plugin (our version).

It works fine with the Fold Category List plugin as long as you have a Post in the parent category. Otherwise the subcategory links will not appear in the sidebar. While this does not actually affect the performance of RYO Just One Category, It makes the page links unavailable.

It might not play well with some other plugins or some themes.

We were using a plugin called "Just One Category" to handle this but after WordPress version 3.0 it broke... So we wrote our own version, nice and clean, using code similar to what we did with Category Visibility. It's an entirely different approach, more likely to last through future versions of WordPress.

How does it work with a post assigned to multiple categories? Frankly, I'm not sure because that's not how we organize our websites. What I think we did was make it so a post signed to a subcategory won't appear. So if you have a category 'Disney' and another category 'Disneyland' where 'Disney' is selected as parent, I think a post assigned to both will show only in the child subcategory. Try it and report what you discover back here.

Download it below.

Instructions

Install it as you would any other WordPress plugin. Download to your computer, go to Plugins, Add New. Choose Upload and follow the directions.

Download the latest version

Get RYO Just One Category Plugin

Posted in WordPress Plugins

30 Responses to ‘RYO Just One Category’ Plugin: Take Subcategory Posts out of Category pages

Vishal on December 8, 2006 at 1:23 am

Works great! Thanks!
tino schramm on January 17, 2007 at 7:28 am

thx ….
Mo on January 17, 2007 at 7:43 am

Hmmm…works only if min. one Post is in the displayed cat. Otherwise i get a 404. :(

Mo
William J Hines on February 2, 2007 at 4:10 pm

Beautiful plug – in. EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks for this contrib!
Mookie on April 9, 2007 at 6:18 pm

This is not working for me. I have ‘Category Visibiliy’ also running (works great!) but this part is not working (as i understand it).
angela on April 12, 2007 at 4:13 am

hi, thanks for this very nice plugin! It works for me, of course. Can you tell me how to change the code so that the plugin does NOT effect on 1 or 2 certain cats?
bas on June 6, 2007 at 11:27 am

Category Visibility works great. NuSubCats is another thing I was looking for. However, I can’t find were to switch on and of the subcategories. It might be a bug, but more likely I’m just blind. Can you help me with this?
Regards,
Bas
Portable Gadgets on June 13, 2007 at 2:09 am

Hi man, I recently download this plugin and want to say you that he is good, but I have same question that bas from previous comment. Can you help me too?
Rich on June 13, 2007 at 6:57 am

If it’s going to work for you, the subcategories will disappear from the parent page simply by activating the plugin. As per instructions above.
SEO Blogger on August 10, 2007 at 12:17 am

Hey, it seems that when I choose to show the ‘number’ of posts in the parent category, the parent category displayed is 1 more than the number of posts indicated — due to the filtering of your NoSubCat plugin.

Hope, you can get this plugin update, since having a post in the parent AND subcat is one of my ‘big’ pet =P. This results in duplicate content, as you may know it. Anyway, hope this plugin will get developed more.
Brian Carnell on September 20, 2007 at 9:14 pm

Awesome job on this plugin.
Brian Carnell on September 27, 2007 at 8:36 am

Does anyone know if this still works with WP 2.3?

Thanks.
tkhobbes on September 30, 2007 at 3:54 am

No it is apparently NOT working with WordPress 2.3! I got weird error messages complaining about the table wp_post2cat being not present when it was activated. Sad enough – the plugin was very good…
Brian Carnell on October 8, 2007 at 3:44 pm

Are there any plans to update this so it works with WordPress 2.3?

Thank you,

Brian
Rich on October 8, 2007 at 4:55 pm

Sorry, no plans for 2.3… I can’t complain that WP is advancing but I’m sticking with 2.0 because I’m unable to keep up with the changes.
Blakey on October 18, 2007 at 6:09 am

Works great, many thanks!

Andy
Güzel Kadın on November 27, 2007 at 2:43 am

Are there any plans to update this so it works with WordPress 2.3?
Thank you
Güzel Kadın
Craig Heimburger on December 7, 2007 at 11:07 pm
If you’re rockin’ WordPress 2.3 and looking for a solution to keep subcategory posts off your page, I can suggest to you a non-plugin approach:

In the Archive.php file of your theme, looking inside of ‘the loop’, just after the

What you want to do is create a IF STATEMENT to see if the posts that are about to be displayed are actually of that category, or not.

I’m doing this with a piece of code that looks like this:

The full markup, though rough, works great on both category and tag pages (and the such):

” title=”Read “>
```
      <div class="text-body"><?php the_content() ?></div>
    <?php } ?>
    <?php if ( in_category($cat) ) { ?>
      <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Read <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
      <div class="text-body"><?php the_content() ?></div>
    <?php } ?>
```
Craig Heimburger on December 7, 2007 at 11:09 pm

Well, even though I used the CODE tags, things didn’t turn out. You can still see the

if ( in_category($cat) )

statement though… good luck
Matteo Raggi on January 6, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Thi look to be super useful?
what about compatibility with WP 2.3.2 ?
where I can find a demo of this plug in in action?
Matteo Raggi on January 6, 2008 at 4:34 pm

I have installed this plugin here: http://www.gioielleriaforli.it/
using wp 2.3.2 uploaded and activated, put nothing happen, what I must do now?
Rob Schumann on January 9, 2008 at 6:58 pm

Hi,

Fold Category List can and does support the display of category links where those categories do not contain posts, however not by default. This is in keeping with the old wp_list_cats tag, which also by default does not include empty categories in the category list.

Turning display of empty categories on requires setting ‘hide_empty=0’ in the arguments.

Fold Category List was recently updated (January 2008) to support the WP 2.3 family and can be downloaded from http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/wordpress/31/
Richard on April 25, 2008 at 1:18 pm

Can someone please give an update to show how to exclude sub-cat posts from the archive pages with Version 2.5?

Thanks
Mike on August 20, 2008 at 5:06 am

needs update!
pranajayas on March 12, 2009 at 9:14 pm

finally I found what I need here, waiting for your new update.
klimeklada on September 4, 2009 at 7:21 am

Hi all,

I have great message for you – this plugin works and do exactly, what you wants:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/just-one-category/
Rich on September 17, 2009 at 5:42 pm

Just One Category is doing what you need so I refer you there.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/just-one-category/

And am therefore closing comments and development on this plugin.
Rich on July 22, 2014 at 4:59 pm

I opened comments back up since the original Just One Category bit the dust, and our new version does the trick!
Eddie on July 26, 2014 at 7:25 pm

RIch, What new version does the trick?
Rich on July 27, 2014 at 3:25 pm

The one above under the heading Download the latest version.