Question

I have a function below whose purpose is to create a listing of posts where the category assigned to each post is “top-menu”. However, I first want to exclude any posts where the category is “hidden”…

How can I edit this code to do that?

global $post;
$cat = get_cat_ID('top-menu');
if ($cat > 1) 
  $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&category='.$cat);
else
  $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=10');
foreach ($myposts as $post) :
?> 
<li>
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
    <?php the_title(); ?>
  </a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Answer 1

This should do what you want. Not sure why you had the if statement, so feel free to incorporate again if you need it. You can always just use category and give it an id instead of category_name as I am using here as a shortcut.

$exclude_cat = get_cat_ID('hidden');
$include_cat = get_cat_ID('top-menu');

$myposts = get_posts( array(
    'numberposts'      => 5,
    'category__in'     => array( $include_cat ),
    'category__not_in' => array( $exclude_cat )
));

EDIT: category_name cannot be combined with category__not_in, so I changed the code slightly so both filters would be run.

I have tested this and it works in WordPress 2.8, just be sure to supply the actual category name in the get_cat_ID calls and not the slug by accident.