wordpress exclude posts from loop if only has one specific category

Question

I have this category which is "community-posts" I don't want it to appear on my homepage loop so I added this to my query

<?php query_posts(array('showposts' => 4,'category__not_in' => $id_communityposts,));?>

This is working fine with me but some "community-posts" I want them to be featured on the homepage loop. (exception)

so I want to only exclude the posts that has one category as "community-posts" if it has this category and more its shows normally.

Answer 1

First thing do not use query_posts - it should never be used as it alter the main query. Use get_posts instead - it's much safer and perform the same task.

To answer your question, let's first imagine how the query would look in SQL (assuming your $id_communityposts is equal to 2) :

SELECT DISTINCT wp_posts.* 
FROM wp_posts, wp_postmeta
    LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id)
    LEFT JOIN wp_term_taxonomy ON (wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)
WHERE 
    wp_posts.ID = wp_postmeta.post_id AND
    (
        (wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN(2))
        OR
        (wp_postmeta.meta_key = 'featured' AND wp_postmeta.meta_value = 1)
    )
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 4

So we query the post, post meta and taxonomy tables and make two possible conditions:

• The category ID is not 2, OR
• The featured meta key of the post is set to 1 (change this to whatever key / value depending of how you store the "featured" information).

For that kind of specific cases, get_posts isn't really good to play with - querying the DB with WPDB will give you much more flexibility.

$posts = $wpdb->get_results(
    "SELECT DISTINCT $wpdb->posts.* 
    FROM $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->postmeta
        LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id)
        LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON ($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)
    WHERE 
        $wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->postmeta.post_id AND
        (
            ($wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN(2))
            OR
            ($wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = 'featured' AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_value = 1)
        )
    ORDER BY $wpdb->posts.post_date DESC
    LIMIT 4"
);

Let me know if you run into any issue as it is an untested query.