Exclude or Include category ids in WP_Query

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As you probably know it, categories are taxonomies. When you use the arguments such as category__in, it will add a tax query to your WP_Query(). So, your situation would be something like this:

$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'post',
    'tax_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'field'    => 'term_id',
            'terms'    => array( 12 ),
            'operator' => 'IN',
        ),
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'field'    => 'term_id',
            'terms'    => array( 11, 12, 13 ),
            'operator' => 'NOT IN',
        ),
    ),
);
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

I wouldn’t think of performance issues here. This is most likely your only solution, if you don’t want to directly query the posts from database by using a SQL query ( This might improve the performance a bit ).

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