Reply To: Using WP's pre_get_posts to exclude post with meta_key

[Kevin deLeon]

I know this post is over a year old…but I thought I’d chime in. Your final solution would break any other meta_queries using “post__not_in” if you happened to have any…I ran into this problem on my site.

So it may be better to preserve that by doing something like:

function exclude_best_of_show( $query ) {
    if ( !is_admin() && $query->is_main_query() && is_post_type_archive( 'shows' ) ) {
       // Get any post__not_in arrays already set
       $current_not_in_array = $query->get('post__not_in');

       // Merge them with your new array to exclude
       $new_post_not_in = array_merge($current_not_in_array, [680]);

       $query->set( 'post__not_in',  $new_post_not_in );
    }
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'exclude_best_of_show' );