I did a slight workaround, not the cleanest , but it works. I created an account called ‘exclude’ and changed the author on the pages I wanted to exclude from displaying to the new ‘exclude’ account, leaving the pages I wanted to display as admin – then wrote my query as below (random display, post type is page, only display pages that were created by the author admin, display 3 per page in 3 columns).
[query orderby=”rand” post_type=”page” author_name=”admin” posts_per_page=”3″ cols=”3″] <h3>{THUMBNAIL}
{TITLE} [/query]
Hope this helps.
Matt