Sometimes a post should stay published and still not appear in a listing. An announcement already featured higher up the page, or a post that belongs elsewhere.
Excluding by post ID removes specific posts from one listing while leaving them live everywhere else.
Before You Start
- Edition: Free — works in Nexter Blocks (free) and with Nexter Blocks Pro.
- Block to enable: Post Listing, switched on under Nexter > Blocks in your WordPress dashboard.
- The post IDs you want to exclude. The ID is in the URL when you edit a post, as
post=123.
Steps
- Find the ID of each post you want to leave out.
- Select your Post Listing block.
- Enter the IDs in the exclude field, separated by commas.
- Publish and confirm those posts are gone from the listing.
How It Behaves
The excluded IDs are removed from the block’s own query before anything renders.
- The posts stay published. Excluding affects this listing only, so the posts are still reachable by URL, in search, and in any other listing.
- It is a comma separated list, so several posts can be excluded at once.
- Excluding changes the count. A listing set to six posts with two excluded shows the next two instead, so it still shows six.
- IDs are permanent, unlike slugs, which is why the block uses them.
- Everything ends up in one attribute. The block writes its whole query configuration into a
data-dypostattribute on the published page, so if a setting is not doing what you expect, that is where to look. - Measured with Nexter Blocks Pro deactivated: the listing still renders its posts. The block itself is free.
Limitations
- It is a manual list. Nothing keeps it up to date, so an exclusion set up a year ago quietly keeps hiding a post nobody remembers.
- IDs are not human readable. Six months later the field says 412, 908 and nobody knows why.
- It only affects this one listing. Excluding in five places means editing five blocks.
- Deleting an excluded post leaves a stale ID in the field, which is harmless but confusing.
- For hiding the newest posts use the offset instead — see hide recent blog posts.
Troubleshooting
The post still shows
Check you used the post ID and not the page ID, and that the list is comma separated with no stray characters.
Where do I find the ID?
Open the post for editing and read it from the address bar, as post=123.
My listing now shows a post I did not expect
Excluding one post lets the next one in, because the listing still fills to its post count. Reduce the count if you do not want that.
I want to hide the newest posts instead
Use the offset rather than exclusions — see hide recent blog posts.
