Simply Exclude Eliminates Category List Content

Stacey,

What version of WP are you running? Was the exact message ‘Narly dude’? This is not from the Simply Exclude plugin. So bring up what other plugins are you running.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish with use of the Simply Exclude plugin? The Category Widget option is simply to filter the Category listing from the default WordPress Categories widget. It other widgets are used or it your theme for some reason is using it’s own categories widget then you might have a problem.

Best,
Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the response. I am using WP 2.9.2. The Simply Exclude plugin is causing the category default WordPress widget to not show the content when you click on the categories and go to the posts under them. I know it’s the plugin because when I deactivate the plugin, the content on the pages come back. I forgot what the message is but I think it’s a 404 error?

The widget I am using is the Default WordPress one.

I am trying to be selective in what categories I am sending out as a post. The Simply Exclude is what I want but not sure why it deletes content out of the category listings widget.

Thanks,
Stacey

Stacey,

In your wp-admin under the Simply Exclude menu section. Select Exclude Categories and please tell me or provide an image of the options you have selected on that page. I really just need the header section so I can attempt to recreate the error on my dev site.

In you last replay I don’t understand your comment ” am trying to be selective in what categories I am sending out as a post.”

The Simply Exclude allows you to hide categories, tags, etc from various sections within WP. So when you select a category and select the ‘Exclude from Archive’ on that row you are telling the Simply Exclude plugin to hide posts in this category from the standard post archive pages. Same for Front, RSS and Search.

On the Simply Exclude ‘Exclude Categories’ admin page. You will find 4 sets of ‘include’ ‘exclude’ radio buttons at the top of the admin page. The Front, Archive, Search and Feed options should be obvious. For example the ‘Front’ means it will effect ‘include’ or ‘exclude’ these categories from the front page of your site.

The 5th option ‘Widget’ is new in SE 1.7.8 This option when set to ‘Yes’ will exclude the category from the default WP Categories Widget listing. So in other word let us assume you have a list of categories like cat1, cat2, … cat10. If you select cat7’s ‘Archive’ checkbox and also set the Widget radio to ‘Yes’ then you will not see ‘cat7’ in your sidebar Categories listing.

Hope that helps.

Though still not sure about the error message you reported.

Hi Paul,

Thank you so much for your response. I really want to get this to work properly. My settings for Simply Exclude at the top are default so they are:

Front – Exclude
Archive – Exclude
Search – Include Only
Feed – Exclude
Widget – No

Then I selected the categories below it and ticked off where I what I wante to Exclude, which is Front, Archive and Feed for about 5 categories. Everything works perfect except in my standard Categories WP widget when you select a category, a message comes up, which says:

You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.
Surfin’ ain’t easy, and right now, you’re lost at sea. But don’t worry; simply pick an option from the list below, and you’ll be back out riding the waves of the Internet in no time.

Hit the “back” button on your browser. It’s perfect for situations like this!
Head on over to the home page.
Punt.

I get this message even when selecting the categories which I am not excluding (not touching) in the Simply Exclude list. So it’s making the WP Category plugin not work.

Is that explained better I hope? Also, I am confused as why you would make selections at the top in the header for including and excluding and then make individual selections for the individual categories. Why do you need both and I am confused as to what overrides the other? Can you explain?

Also, can you let me know what I need to select to get the WP categories working. Here is the link and you’ll see that it’s not working when you click on any category in the list;

https://www.virtuesforlife.com

Thank you so much, and I look forward to your response.

Stacey

Hi Stacey,
I hope we are getting close on this. I took a look at your site. I found the Category dropdown on the right sidebar marker ‘Topics’. When I select a category from the dropdown the browser URL changes to something like ‘https://www.virtuesforlife.com/?cat=6’ then after a few seconds the browser URL changes to ‘https://www.virtuesforlife.com/category/’ then I see the 404 error message. That message is from your theme. It’s the 404 message and no something from Simply Exclude. If you want to change t I would look for a file 404.php in your current active theme folder.

But back to your issue. As far as I can tell the dropdown functionality is the standard WP category widget. Question back to you. If you don’t use the dropdown does it work any better?

Also you provided the information about the top of the Category admin page and which of the actions were set. But then you just mentioned you have 5 or so categories checked in the lower section. I would like to know exactly which categories you have set. From the category dropdown on your site I see 7 categories listed. So I would like to know which 2 categories are unset under Archive. When you click on an item in the dropdown you should be taken to that category’s archive page. I’ve tried all 7 categories and no luck on any of them.

To your question about the Simply Exclude interface and why have the top section and the lower section the answer is based on needed functionality. In the header section the user is allow to select between the two options ‘Include’ or ‘Exclude’. This action then effects the select categories in the lower section. For example when I originally wrote the plugin I was working on client site which had dozens or categories. But the client only wanted one or two categories to display on the blog front page. At that time I only had the lower category listing. When I would ‘exclude’ all but the two categories. Well the problem then is every time they add a new category to the system I had to login and exclude that category from showing on front page. Total pain. So I added the top section which lets me tell the plugin I only want to include the categories selected in the lower section. So now the client can add as many new categories as they want. But only the 2 I’ve set will be included. Hope that is clear.

The other possible area i would like to suggest is to switch to the default WP theme. See if the categories behave differently.

Hi Paul,

Hate to be a pest about this but when I deactivate the Simply Exclude Plugin all the category pages in the Topics listing come back with the content and no 404 error. That’s how I know someting is not agreeing with the Plugin. It’s like it’s excluding all the categories completely.

Not sure what you mean by “If I don’t use the dropdown is it any better?” If you mean do I have a category in the nav. menu, I have not switched over yet (this is what I am going to do), and I can’t until I know that this works. Are you thinking its the WP Category plugin somehow?

I have not published to all the categories yet that I want to exclude so you won’t see them in the dropdown. The only one there is Serve & Be Great and when I used the Simply Exclude plugin, it totally worked EXCEPT that the category content in the WP Widget Category dropdown, when selected, gives me the 404 error and all content is removed. But when I deactivate the Simply Exclude plugin everything comes back. I am using Thesis Theme.

Thanks for the explanation about the exclude. I have to see if I can figure it out.

I am too afraid to switch to another theme even to test. Too much work went into the site.

I look forward to any insight you may have. Have you tested the plugin with the Thesis Theme?

Thanks,
Stacey

Stacey,

I understand your statement about when you deactivate the SE plugin things display normally. I have a test environment setup on my end and the SE plugin works as expected. Without direct access to your site it’s very difficult to piece together how your site is different or what is going on. Thanks for the patience.

About my comment regarding not using dropdown. In the Category Widget there is a checkbox to display the categories as a dropdown or not. So I was wondering if you uncheck the checkbox are the sidebar results any different.

Actually let us take the sidebar widget out of the equation. As I mentioned in my previous post when I select a category from the dropdown (Articles) the browser URL first goes to something like https://www.virtuesforlife.com/?cat=3 then changes again to just https://www.virtuesforlife.com/category/ You are seeing the 404 error with the “You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.” because in WordPress you are not allowed to surf to the top-level category URL. The URL should be contain the actual category slug like https://www.virtuesforlife.com/category/articles/ When I surf directly to the complete categories URL I get valid pages not 404.

So to me this is sort of perplexing. The Simply Exclude plugin doesn’t manage URL and permalinks and such. It’s simply a filter. When the browser requests a page the SE simply checks “is the user requesting the front page”, “An Archive”, “A Feed”, etc. Then for each of these sections I’m filtering the categories which should be displayed on those Home, Archive, Feed, etc pages.

I was not asking to make a permanent switch on the theme. I really just wanted to switch to the WP default theme, TwentyTen. Since that is the more baseline theme which almost all plugins are tested against. I own a copy of the Thesis theme (somewhere). Let me dig it up and see if I can run some tests with the SE plugin.

Hi Paul,

I will uncheck the dropdown and see what happens and let you know.

I agree with you that it is perplexing that the category pages work with the right URL. I noticed that when I select from the dropdown the URL is: https://www.virtuesforlife.com/category and there is nothing to identify what category it is after the word category so no wonder I am getting an error.

I don’t know how I will get the permalinks to correct themselves and go to the right one. I will play around with the widget and let you know how it goes. Since its the weekend, I’ll need a couple of days to get back to you.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and quick responses. You really stand behind your plugin!

Stacey

Hi Paul,

Okay, sorry this took awhile but I did what you said and unchecked the Category dropdown so now it’s a list on the site. Wouldn’t you know it fixed the problem. Now when you select on a category the page displays correctly, no error, and all the content is there. Why, in the heck, would that matter? Do you have any insight?

So I will be using your plugin but will just have the categories listed insteaad of a drop down.

One last thing – if you click on the link below, you’ll see that a post that I excluded, using your plugin, called “Building Dream Homes” is showing up as a “Next Post” at the bottom of the post. I would like to have it excluded from there too because it was never a blog/front page post but still appears at the bottom of this post. Do you have a fix for that?

https://www.virtuesforlife.com/video-a-surprise-birthday-gift/

Thank you so much for hanging in there for me with this, and I look forward to your response.

Stacey

Stacey,

Great! Glad to hear we are at least making progress on your issues. Glad the list works. I think this might be something with Thesis. Though cannot prove it at the moment. Have had too much client work to fully investigate. Maybe some time over the long weekend. This was why I was asking you to switch to the WP default theme (TwentyTen). Sometimes themes do funny things to default widgets.

As for your other issues I didn’t know about that one. I’ll need to look into somehow excluding posts from the single post view. This was not part of the original scope of the plugin I developed. But it is a valid request. Thanks for brining it to my attention.