Count posts excluding certain categories

[jacorre]

I’ve been searching for the right way to count all published posts but excluding specific categories. I know of the function wp_count_posts but it doesn’t have the option to exclude specific categories. So I came up with the following:

$categories = get_categories('exclude=1,2,3');

foreach($categories as $category) {

$total += $category->count;

}

echo $total;

?>

It works! But is that the correct way or is there some other way I’m missing?

[Keyamoon]

You could also use get_posts() with the category__not_in parameter and then counting the number of returned posts but I’m not sure if it would be a faster/more efficient solution.

[jacorre]

This loop was accepted at WP-Snippets so I guess it’s a good way of doing it!

[TheDoc]

Well done! It’s short and looks clean enough.

[poorpaddy]

Is there way to do this for a specific post type? Here’s what I am working with and trying to exclude categories,

<?php
$count_posts = wp_count_posts('sponsors');
$published_posts = $count_posts->publish;
$count = $published_posts/7;
$args = array(
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'post_type' => 'sponsors'
);
query_posts($args);
?>

[Paulie_D]

Serious necro-post, dude!

I hope someone can help you.

[poorpaddy]

I figured it out. Just needed to add 'cat' => '-71,-72,-73' to the $args.

<?php
$count_posts = wp_count_posts('sponsors');
$published_posts = $count_posts->publish;
$count = $published_posts/7;
$args = array(
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'post_type' => 'sponsors',
'cat' => '-71,-72,-73'
);
query_posts($args);
?>

[Author]

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