How to exclude a category from the category list widget for non admin users

Question

I'm trying to exclude one category from the category list widget on the Shop and product archive pages for users other than the administrator. But for some reason it doesn't work.

Any help, thanks.

function exclude_category( $terms, $taxonomies, $args ) {
    $new_terms = array();

    /*if ( !is_admin()  && ( is_product() || is_shop() || is_product_category() || is_product_tag() ) ){ */
    if ( !is_admin() || is_product() || is_shop() || is_product_category() || is_product_tag()  ){  
        foreach ( $terms as $key => $term ) {
            if( is_object ( $term ) ) {
                if ( 'some-category' == $term->slug && $term->taxonomy = 'product_cat' ) {
                    unset($terms[$key]);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $terms;
}
add_filter( 'get_terms', 'exclude_category', 10, 3 );

I was inspired by this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48849931/16275280

Answer 1

Excluding a product category on WooCommerce

Use the following conditional checks instead:

• To check whether a user is admin or not, you could use the roles property of the user object returned from wp_get_current_user^Docs function.
• To check whether you're on woocommerce pages or not (i.e is_product() || is_shop() || is_product_category() || is_product_tag()), you could simply use this is_woocommerce() function.

So the entire code would be:

add_filter('get_terms', 'exclude_category', 10, 3);

function exclude_category($terms, $taxonomies, $args)
{
    $roles = wp_get_current_user()->roles;

    if 
      (
        !in_array('administrator', $roles)
        &&
        is_woocommerce() 
      ) 
    {
        foreach ($terms as $key => $term) 
        {
            if (is_object($term)) 
            {
                if ('decor' == $term->slug && $term->taxonomy == 'product_cat') 
                {
                    unset($terms[$key]);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $terms;
}

Note:

• I've used 'decor' as the category slug to test this snippet on my site, so don't forget to replace it with your own category slug.

And here's the result:

---

Excluding a category on Wordpress

add_filter('get_terms', 'exclude_category', 10, 3);

function exclude_category($terms, $taxonomies, $args)
{
    $roles = wp_get_current_user()->roles;

    if (
        !in_array('administrator', $roles)
       ) 
    {
        foreach ($terms as $key => $term) 
        {
            if (is_object($term)) 
            {
                if ('uncategorized' == $term->slug && $term->taxonomy == 'category') 
                {
                    unset($terms[$key]);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $terms;
}

Note:

• I've used 'uncategorized' as the category slug to test this snippet on my site, so don't forget to replace it with your own category slug.

---

Excluding multiple categories in WooCommerce

You could set up an array and use in_array function for the conditional check. Like this:

$excluded_cat_slugs = array ('hoodies', 'decor');  

if(in_array($term->slug, $excluded_cat_slugs) && $term->taxonomy == 'product_cat')

---

Excluding multiple categories in Wordpress

$excluded_cat_slugs = array ('uncategorized', 'test-category');  

if(in_array($term->slug, $excluded_cat_slugs) && $term->taxonomy == 'category')