I’m just throwing this out there in the off chance it might help: I too converted an old static HTML site to WordPress, migrated a lot of content. I also have a wordpress blog.
On each site, I selectively display recent posts in the sidebar, excluding some categories. I dont use any plugins to achieve the selectivity.
You can do a Selective Display of recent posts with a single WP Query, by specifying the categories eligible for display. This has the effect of excluding all unspecified categories.
My approach might not work for you though, because my categories are complete and unchanging. The code would have to be tweaked if I decided to Add a Category.
Here’s my Selective Recent Posts query from my sidebar, where I specify the categories eligible for the Recent Posts list (remove extra spaces from the code to use)
code
< ? php query _ posts (“cat=14,3,17,4,6,1,10,13,8,2,18&showposts=10”); ? >
/code
Variations of this code are in the sidebar on my formerly HTML site at https://www.TimsLaw.com, and on my political journal at https://www.RadMod.com.
