Exclude a category in Last 5 Block?

pezzer · New Member Joined: Nov 28, 2007 Posts: 10

Something like this is surely already mentioned somewhere here, but I can't find it, so...

I'm trying to exclude a specific category (and possible multiple categories) from the "Last 5 Articles" block. I tried to modify the sql query with no luck. I looked at other examples of WHERE statements, but I can't seem to make this one work as those are listed.
Here is the original line in the "block-Last_5_Articles.php" file.

Code:

$sql = 'SELECT sid, title, comments, counter FROM '.$prefix.'_stories '.$querylang.' ORDER BY sid DESC LIMIT 0,5';

I modified it to this:

Code:

$sql = 'SELECT sid, catid, title, comments, counter FROM '.$prefix.'_stories '.$querylang.' WHERE 'catid' !='4' ORDER BY sid DESC LIMIT 0,5';

I tried a few variations as well as trying to add escape characters in front of the ' but nothing worked. Something I didn't try because I don't quite understand it is to turn catid into $catid and do something with that.

Do I need to globally define catid and/or turn it into $catid?

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to make this work?

Gremmie · Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 5:30 pm

Looks like you got your quotes messed up. Try this:

Code:

$sql = 'SELECT sid, catid, title, comments, counter FROM '.$prefix.'_stories '.$querylang.' WHERE catid != 4 ORDER BY sid DESC LIMIT 0,5';

This will probably fail if you have the $multilingual set to 1 also, because $querylang will already contain a WHERE clause. But if you don't, it should work.

pezzer · New Member Joined: Nov 28, 2007 Posts: 10

Excellent. That worked perfectly. I think leaving the quotes off would have been the last thing I tried (and by far the simplest.)

Thank you - That will help tremendously...

So in 6 months or 2 years if I upgrade to a multilingual site, I am NEVER going to understand why my site is suddenly failing. I better leave myself a note right now. Very Happy

gregexp · Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 6:57 pm

just remember this, this is how I think of quotes:
$var2='second part of string';
$var='part of string'.$var2.'third part of string';

The dots tell it to add it to the string, I think of it as different parts, first quote begines the quote, the next quote ends it. So to tell php not to take it literally, we backslash it, If I wrote:

$var='don\'t walk the dog today';

The second quote, which is backslashed, isnt the end of the first part, the backslash tells php not to take it literally, but that it is actually a part of the
string.