Fine tuning post display in WordPress

There are some small tweaks to this blog’s navigation which give more flexibility on the type of posts I can make.

I created some special tags for posts when I want this fine tuned behaviour:

• Quick Thoughts when I just want to say something short, a bit like a tweet. This is random stuff at random times, so I don’t want it appearing on the home page or in the main RSS feed. There’s a special archive template to show these on the Quick Thoughts page.
• RSS only for posts that only RSS subscribers can read. So these need to show up in the feeds but not the website.
• Not in main feed is for any post that I want to publish but I don’t want it to appear on the home page or the main RSS page. Usually because I have a specific schedule and theme around the main posts, and this just doesn’t fit it. A good example are posts for my maths reading project which no-one is interested in except me!

I use WordPress, and although there may well be some plug-ins to do this, it’s just as quick to write a bit of custom code and get exactly the behaviour I want.

I’ve included the code below. If anyone wants to use it, it should be self explanatory how to customise it – all you do is change the tag IDs to ones relevant for your system.

If you’ve never used custom code on wordpress before, I recommend installing the Code Snippets plug-in which allows you to have as many custom code pieces as you want.

Finally, as an additional source of amusement for myself, this is what an rss only post looks like if you try to view it on the web. It really is a secret between me and your RSS reader.

function include_exclude_from_feeds($query) {
	$not_in_tags = array();
	// Don't show certain tags on the home page or RSS feed
    if (is_home() 
        || ( is_feed() 
             && !is_tag()  
             && !is_category() ) ) {
    
       // 10 is Quick Thoughts, 62 is Not in main feed
        array_push($not_in_tags, 10, 62);  
        
    }
	// Don't show certain tags on the home page or archives
	if ( (is_home() || is_archive()) 
             && !is_feed() 
             && !is_admin())  {
          // 60 is RSS only
          array_push($not_in_tags, 60); 
    }
    $query->set('tag__not_in',$not_in_tags);
    return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','include_exclude_from_feeds');