Web Design

How to Exclude specific categories from being displayed in the sidebar in WordPress 2.7 and beyond. In the following simple solution, I show you How to keep select categories from displaying in your sidebar on your WordPress pages and posts. This is very useful if you have a lot of categories, or have changed the content of your blog, have been indexed for the content and no longer wish to use or display specific categories on your WordPress site. Upon completion of this tutorial, the permalink structure of the hidden categories are still made available to the search engines, however, the categories you have chosen to hide are no longer displayed from your blog sidebar to the visitor.

Exclude Categories from displaying in the Sidebar – WordPress 2.7

Locate which categories you would like to hide from displaying in the sidebar. Category ID’s can be found from the WordPress Admin Panel under Manage-> Categories. Simply hover over a category and the cat_ID=# will be listed at the bottom of your browser window.
Using an FTP client, FTP to your WordPress installation
Navigate to wp-includes/widgets.php and copy widgets.php to your desktop
Open widgets.php with a text editor and find the following line:

$d = $options[$number]['dropdown'] ? ’1′ : ’0′;

Under this line, add the following line:

$ex = “1,2,3″;

Change 1,2,3 to reflect the category ID’s you would like to exclude
Next, find the following line:

$cat_args = array(‘orderby’ => ‘name’, ‘show_count’ => $c, ‘hierarchical’ => $h);

Replace it with the following line,

$cat_args = array(‘orderby’ => ‘name’, ‘show_count’ => $c, ‘hierarchical’ => $h, ‘exclude’ => $ex );

Save the widgets.php file and upload it to your wp-includes directory on your server
Go view your site. Your sidebar category widget should now be displaying all but the excluded categories.

That was it. Enjoy it

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Many of you have asked for a way to preview ads before they appear in your feed posts. That feature is now available.

The Ad Review Center (ARC) will give you more transparency and control by enabling you to approve or disapprove placement targeted ad creatives before they appear in your posts.

To get started with this tool, please login to your AdSense account. You will find ARC in the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ section located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. If you are using your AdSense account for other products- content, mobile, or video- please make sure to select the Client-ID starting with ca-feed-pub.

In order to maximize your revenue, we suggest that you keep the default setting to, ‘Run ads immediately.’ This will allow ads to run without delay while still allowing you to login and review the ads at a later time. By selecting the ‘Hold ads’ option, you could potentially decrease your revenue. This option will hold ads from displaying for 24 hours, thus limiting the number of advertisers’ driving up your auction price.

You will then have the ability to approve or block a specific ad or advertiser in general. These settings can be changed at any time. Please keep in mind that blocking ads will remove them from the auction and could impact your revenue.

For more information about using the Ad Review Center, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Barbara Bochner, Google Publisher Solutions Team