Display Category in a Dropdown Menu

Some blogs have a lot of categories which they can’t display in their sidebar. Or some bloggers do not want to take up a lot of space displaying categories. This option allows them to have a select menu, dropdown menu, for categories. See WordPress Codex for details.

<form action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" method="get">
<?php
$select = wp_dropdown_categories('show_option_none=Select Category&show_count=1&orderby=name&echo=0&selected=6');
$select = preg_replace("#<select([^>]*)>#", "<select$1 onchange='return this.form.submit()'>", $select);
echo $select;
?>
<noscript><input type="submit" value="View" /></noscript>
</form>



Exclude Certain Categories from Being Displayed in a Loop

Your blog page shows recent posts from all categories. If you want to have a separate page for some reason, or do not want to display certain categories, you can use the following code, and it will exclude a certain category from being displayed in a Loop. Just change the category IDs.

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-13,-26'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

Display Certain Categories in a Menu

In many cases, users only want to display certain categories in their navigation menu at the top of the page. There are limited spots, that can only be filled by top categories, but if you use the default wp_list_categories code, it will show all categories. This is why this hack below comes in very handy when you want to create a navigation menu and only display certain categories.


<ul class="navmenubar" style="float:left; width:730px;">
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=name&include=7,9,19,16,1,5,17,23'); ?>
</ul>


Note, you can also change the ‘include’ text to ‘exclude’ and show all categories and exclude those that you don’t want displayed. The numbers displayed in the code are the category IDs. Remember since WordPress shows categories in a list format, you will need to edit the CSS in order to make it work.