WP Hide Post: WordPress Plugin
This plugin enables the author to write posts/pages that are hidden on some parts of your blog, while still visible in other parts as well as to search engines. If you’ve used the WP low Profiler plugin before, this is the same plugin with a new name. WP low Profiler is deprecated in favor of this plugin.
Description
This plugin excels in giving you full control over the visibility of your a post. By default, any post you add to your WordPress blog will become the topmost post, and will show up immediately on the front page in the first position, and similarly in category/tag/archive pages. Sometimes, you want to create a “low-profile” addition to your blog that doesn’t belong on the front page, or maybe you don’t want it to show up anywhere else in your blog except when you explicitly link to it. This plugin allows you to create such “hidden gems”.
In particular, this plugin allows you to control the visibility of a post in various different views:
- The Front Page (Homepage, depending on your theme, this may not be relevant)
- The Category Page (listing the posts belonging to a category)
- The Tag Page (listing the posts tagged with a given tag)
- The Authors Page (listing the posts belonging to an author)
- The Archive Pages (listing the posts belonging to time period: month, week, day, etc..)
- The Search Results
- Feeds
The posts will disappear from the places you choose them to disappear. Everywhere else they will show up as regular posts. In particular, permalinks of the posts still work, and if you generate a sitemap, with something like the Google XML Sitemaps the post will be there as well. This means that the content of your post will be indexed and searchable by search engines.
For a WordPress page, this plugin also allows you to control the visibility with two options:
- Hide a page on the front page (homepage) only.
- Hide a page everywhere in the blog (hiding the page in the search results is optional).
This means, technically, whenever pages are listed somewhere using the get_pages filter, this plugin will kick in and either filter it out or not according to the options you choose. The same rules apply regarding permalinks and sitemaps as they do for regular posts.
“WP Hide Post” plugin is a great tool in your arsenal for SEO optimization. It allows you to add plenty of content to your blog, without forcing you to change the nature and presentation of your front page, for example. You can now create content that you otherwise would be reluctant to add to your blog because it would show immediately on the front page, or somewhere else where it would not belong. It’s a must-have feature of WordPress.
Please enjoy this plugin freely, comment and rate it profusely, and send me feedback and any ideas for new features.
Installation
- Upload the
wp-hide-postfolder to the/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the
Pluginsmenu in WordPress - That’s it!! Now whenever you edit a post/page or create a new one, you will see a small panel on the bottom right of the screen that shows the applicable options.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this plugin do?
It enables you to create posts/pages that can be hidden (temporarily or permanently) from the homepage, feeds and/or other places. The post/page will remain accessible normally through other means, such as permalinks, archives, search, etc… and thus will remain visible to search engines.
How can I make a post or a page private so that no one can see it?
If you want to make a post/page completely private you don’t need this plugin. WordPress supports options such as private and/or password-protected posts/pages out of the box.
Can I make a post or a page *hidden* for a while, but then make it normal again?
Yes. The hidden flags are just another set of attributes of a post/page. They can be added or removed at any time, just like editing anything else about the post.
I have an idea to improve this feature further, what can I do?
Please contact me on my blog An Apple a Day. I’m looking forward to hearing any suggestions.
I just found something that doesn’t look right, do I just sit on it?
By all means no! Please report any bugs on my blog An Apple a Day. I’d really appreciate it. This is free software and I rely on the help of people like you to maintain it.
I’m worried this could reduce my search engine ranking. Is it gonna?
Not at all. On the contrary. All the content you include on your blog, even though it’s not directly accessible from the homepage for example, it’s still to be available when search engines crawl your site, and will remain linkable for those individuals that are interested in it. Furthermore, if you use some sitemap generation plugin (like the Google XML Sitemaps plugin I use on my own blog) all the content will be published to web crawlers and will be picked up by search engines. In fact, this plugin will make your SEO more effective by allowing you to add content that you wouldn’t otherwise want to show on your homepage.
I used the ‘WP low Profiler’ plugin before. This one sounds just like it.
This plugin is the new version of the ‘WP low Profiler’. The name has been changed, but the functionality and codebase is identical. In fact, once you activate this plugin, it will upgrade the existing ‘WP low Profiler’ plugin and take its place. The last version of ‘WP low Profiler’, 2.0.3, corresponds to the first version of ‘WP Hide Post’, 1.0.3.
I already have ‘WP low Profiler’ installed and activated. What’s going to happen to it?
‘WP Hide Post’ will take the place of ‘WP low Profiler’. Once ‘WP Hide Post’ is activated, ‘WP low Profiler’ is deactivated and deleted. All its data is imported first, so you won’t loose any data.
I already have ‘WP low Profiler’ installed but it’s not activated. What’s going to happen to it?
Ditto. It will be deleted. If you had any existing data (if you had it active before) the data will persist.
Why did you change the name of ‘WP low Profiler’ ‘to WP Hide Post’?
‘WP low Profiler’ wasn’t descriptive enough of the functionality of the plugin. Being ‘low profile’ could mean many things to many people. It was hard to find and many people who needed it didn’t know it exists because of that.
Screenshots
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- Closeup of WP-Hide-Post “Visibility Attributes” for posts
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- A small panel will appear whenever you are editing or creating a post. You can check one or more of the visibility attributes as needed.
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- Closeup of WP-Hide-Post “Visibility Attributes” for pages
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- Another panel will appear whenever you are editing or creating a new page. You can check one or more of the visibility attributes as is needed. Note that options for pages are different from those of posts.
Changelog
- 01/02/2010: v1.1.9 – Compatibility with WordPress 2.9. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 10/24/2009: v1.1.4 – Added compatibility with WordPress 2.8.5. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 08/07/2009: v1.1.3 – Extended support for version 2.6 of WordPress. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 08/07/2009: v1.1.2 – Bug fix release. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 08/05/2009: v1.1.1 – Reduce the number of SQL queries to hide pages to a single queries for all pages, rather than one query per page.. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 08/04/2009: v1.1.0 – Bug fix: bulk update clears “Visibility Attributes”. Split code into separate files. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 07/24/2009: v1.0.4 – Minor bug fixes. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
- 07/24/2009: v1.0.3 – Initial public release and deprecation of “WP low Profiler”. Download from WordPress (Browse Subversion).
See Also
- WordPress plugin page.
- A collection of relevant books about WordPress in general, and plugin development.
I am having issues with your plugin… I’m trying to use it to hide certain posts from displaying on my home page. We run a video blog and often post submitted content from viewers, we like to post everything we get but not all videos are “front page worthy” if you know what I mean. If I’m using a splash page and our actual post listing is located at skatehousemedia.com/home, could this be why posts are still appearing after I select “hide from front page?”
Hi Robert,
Thanks for this. As you say, a must-have for any wp site.
But… something seems not right – I have a site built on the standard 2010 theme. In the ‘What’s New’ widget, my post still shows even though I have checked every ‘hide’ box you made.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Richie
Also, is this plugin still being supported? The WordPress plugin directory shows it was last updated in January 2010, the record points to an expired version of this site, this blog post is dated July 2009, and the blog itself hasn’t been updated in a year. If the plugin is no longer supported, please consider indicating this in the directory. Thanks.
Many thanks for creating this plugin; it looks great.
I use the Random Redirect plugin to permit users to view random posts on my blog:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-redirect/
Do you happen to know whether WP Hide Post would hide posts from that plugin? I’m hoping it will. Thanks.
I must say, I don’t know why WP-Hide-Post features are missing from the WordPress software. Features like these should be a “given” in this type of program. It’s a good thing WP-Hide-Post is available to make WordPress “Complete”.
Please add this to an improvement list:
It would be nice to see this in the “Bulk Actions” at the top of the Page or Post List.
I find myself having to go through each page and change from searchable true to false, or Hide Page or not. (While I am designing pages, I would like to expose a group of pages, then hide them all at once.)
Also, WordPress.org shows compatibility up to 2.9.2. This seems to be working on 3.0.1, but would be comforted to see this updated to 3.0.1 compatibility.
Look forward to having this feature added.
Thanks
Davekat
Great plugin, it does exactly what I need it to do. I have a question though – Is there a way that the plugin be set to automatically hide posts from a particular category? I use the wp-robot plugin , and would like to hide those post .