Not excluding categories after upgrade

I think we need to first fix the code for the shortcode:

Change this line:

$p_in_c = ( in_array( $cat->cat_ID, $exclude_categories ) ) ? true : false;

to

$p_in_c = ( in_array( $cat->cat_ID, $exclude_categories ) || in_array( $cat->term_taxonomy_id, $exclude_categories ) ) ? true : false;

I’ve done that on my dev site, but I’m not clear which combination of settings you want me to try out on the shortcode and the Top 10 settings, and what you’d like me to report back with.

I also could only get the shortcode to work properly if I used the “106” value in the exclude_categories, but that’s not a value I have access to from the front end i.e. when I edit the category, the only ID visible is 96.

The 106 is actually the correct number to use. But, I agree with you, that 106 isn’t available from the front end.

I’m still trying to figure out a correct way of finding this. The easiest way to do that now is to use the plugin settings page and it will display the ID. I believe this is 106 when you save options there?

Also worth running this in your database:

SELECT * FROM wp_term_taxonomy WHERE term_taxonomy_id != term_id

It will show you all the categories which don’t have the same term_id and term_taxonomy_id respectively.

I suspect that the 96 term_id is one of the them and you might have a different term_taxonomy_id

SELECT t.*, tt.* FROM wp_terms AS t
INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy as tt ON t.term_id = tt.term_id

Hi,

Further to my messages above, I’ve been trying to simulate the different settings. I noticed that using the term_id as your exclude_categories seems to be working fine on my install.

So, if you set the exclude category using the slug in the Settings page, it would (and seems like it is) give you the term_taxonomy_id i.e. in your case 106

Running it in the shortcode, you’d use the term_id which is publicly available (which I think is 96 in your case) and this should work fine.

Could you please let me know if it’s possible to get access to your dev install. You can contact me via https://webberzone.com/contact/ with details, if possible.

I’ve just send you a message via your site with login details to my dev site.

Thank you. I received it and checked out the site.

Will all the querying and checking above I noticed that the solution was rather simple., I believe.

For the shortcode, you needed to pass the daily parameter to get the Custom time period posts as below. Once that was done the posts matched with your widget. Check out the test site now. It has both the exclude categories set in both the shortcode and the settings page and gives identical results.

[tptn_list limit="6" heading="0" exclude_categories="96" daily="1"]

OK, I can see that now, thank you. I didn’t realise that the “daily” flag in the shortcode corresponded to the “daily” setting in the back end, which I had set to 30 days, but now that makes sense. And my widget is set to show the last 30 days as well, so that makes them match up.

So whatever categories are excluded in the settings are excluded automatically from the widget, but the period can be customised on the fly. And whatever “daily” period is set to in the settings is applied automatically to the shortcode (provided you use the “daily” flag) but you have to exclude the categories separately. Is my understanding correct?

So can you explain why the shortcode only displays 3 posts when the daily flag is not set but the exclude_categories is? Because of the top 6 posts (without daily or exclusions), only 2 are adventures and 4 are recipes, so I still don’t understand that fully.

And the widget was displaying my home page as one of my top 6 posts when I remove the ‘adventures’ exclusion from the settings, even though I have it set to only use posts in the results in the back-end settings, because I hadn’t also set the widget to display only posts.

I’m getting the sense that most of the differences are coming from not realising where the settings come from – the back-end settings, the shortcode settings or the widget settings, and there’s some differences in how they’re applied across them widget and the shortcode.

But I’m seeing now that mostly if I keep playing with the settings, I should be able to get the results I want.

Setting the daily flag turns on the “custom / daily” period.

The settings used to exclude categories works in both the widget and the shortcode. They hit the query used to fetch the posts directly.

The exclusion setting in the shortcode works over and above. In your case the adventures category is same and so it doesn’t give a different output. You could potentially use another category in the shortcode and that too will be excluded.

You can override the custom period days by using daily_range="25" attribute to set it to 25 days with the daily attribute also set.