Excluding Categories from RSS Feed

On my E.Webscapes site – I have several different sections. The entire site is powered by the fabulous WordPress CMS, and yet, each of the different sections of my site have a different type of set up. I publish two different feeds at E.Webscapes. One is for my Design Blog and the other is just for my Design Portfolio feed. I handle posts to the blog and the portfolio in the same manner, the key is the category I assign each post to. The portfolio is assigned only to the “Design Portfolio” category – while posts to the design blog are assigned to varous different categories – except the “Design Portfolio” category. So, how do I seperate the Design Portfolio feeds from the regular blog posts? I mean, if I’m publishing a feed that includes all the posts to the blog – – and the Design Portfolio posts are included — how do I keep those posts out of my main feed?

To complicate matters, I also have a category I make posts to callled “Client Testimonials” — that is where I post all the testimonials that are left by our wonderful clients and are posted seperately from the blog here.

Keeping the Design Portfolio and Testimonial posts off my main blog is just a matter of some PHP code – but how to keep them out of the main feed, as well? I use Feedburner, for one thing. When you sign up for a Feedburner account, one of the first things you have to provide is the RSS Feed URL for the feed you want to publish.

On my site – the categories I need to exclude are:
‘Design Portfolio’ (which has the category ID of 19)
‘Client Testimonials’ (which has the category ID of 18)

So, when I provided my Feed URL to feedburner – here is what it looked like:

http://ewebscapes.com/feed?cat=-18&cat=-19

The last bit is what tells it to exclude categories from the feed – – and they are excluded by category ID: ?cat=-18&cat=-19

You can exclude any category from your main feed that you’d like, just by using that last statement that includes which category ID you would like to exclude. Of course, this works in any scenario, not just Feedburner. Most sites don’t have a need to exclude categories from their main RSS Feed – – but some do. I do – which is why I use it and thought I’d pass along that bit-o-knowledge.. hope it helps someone somewhere 🙂 That’s all.

Disclaimer – I’ve verified this works with the WordPress 2.0 development track, as well as 2.2 and 2.3 – just an fyi