Altering the loop – in custom (not mine) php…

I am not sure I quite understand. A link to your site might help.

As for inserting -3 in the cat list, I am not sure that will do what you want. Your query is defined by $wp_query = new WP_Query($args);, and you can’t have a second query without messing up that one. I think that adding the -3 exclusion in this code will only help if some posts are in two categories, but I could be wrong. Anyway, if you want to try excluding category 3, you can alter the $args array like this:

$args=array(
   'category__in' => array($cat),
   'category__not_in' => array(3),
   'orderby' => 'date',
   'order' => 'DESC',
   'paged' => $paged,
   'posts_per_page' => $post_per_page,
   'caller_get_posts' => $do_not_show_stickies
);

For your last question: Yes, when you are excluding a category with ‘cat=-2’, or ‘category__not_in’, you must use an id.

Sorry for the delay.

Link: https://teknikor.com/content/news/

As you’ll see, if you click on the top News item and go to its individual post, the link to “previous” is a news item, but the “next” link is a job offering! That’s what I’m looking to solve.

Confusion is probably on my end, I must be misinterpreting the codex’s loop page. Is that just for sidebar info or info under the post or something?

Thanks on clarifying that last point, too.

This may not be the complete solution, but it is a first step if it works. Please make a backup copy of single.php, them change this:

<div class="navigation">
      <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link') ?></div>
      <div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;') ?></div>
   </div>

to this:

<div class="navigation">
      <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link',true) ?></div>
      <div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;',true) ?></div>
   </div>

Sorry, I left out one parameter:

<div class="navigation">
      <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link','%title',true) ?></div>
      <div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;','%title',true) ?></div>
   </div>

Sorry, I may be being dense — Isn’t that mostly css? I don’t see how it address my issue of separating posts of the News (category) from Jobs (category)…

It isn’t css, it changes the parameters to previous/next_post_link in single.php. That means when you see a link on a single post page, it will only show posts that are in the same category as the current post. I think that is the original problem you described.

It isn’t the final solution, because it will make all single post displays stay in category, and you probably don’t want that for your blog section (assuming you have one). But I want to make sure that it solves the current problem before proceeding.

Oop, sorry — thanks! We actually DON’T have a blog on that site, so unless they decide to add one, I’m all set. And if they do, well, I’ll worry about that then.

Thanks SO MUCH!

You are welcome.