Just set ‘post__in’ to a null array. add_action( ‘pre_get_posts’, function( \WP_Query $q ) { if( ! is_admin() && $q->is_category() && $q->is_main_query() ) { $sticky_posts = get_option( ‘sticky_posts’ ); //If there are sticky posts if( ! empty( $sticky_posts ) ) { $q->set( ‘post__in’, (array) $sticky_posts ); } //If not else { $q->set( ‘post__in’, array(0) ); } … Read more
If you want to totally remove the sticky posts from the query, you need to use post__not_in. The Codex has an example, which you can adapt to your needs: $paged = get_query_var( ‘paged’ ) ? get_query_var( ‘paged’ ) : 1; $sticky = get_option( ‘sticky_posts’ ); $args = array( ‘cat’ => 3, ‘ignore_sticky_posts’ => 1, ‘post__not_in’ … Read more
Sticky posts are a feature of the home page, not of the post. The post has no reason to “know” it is sticky. The home page OTOH do not have any formal form of storage and therefor traditionally options related to it are stored in the options table
A ‘sticky post’ (as mentioned by @milo ) is what you want to do for the post to be ‘sticky’ at the top of the posts page. (Answer added to get this question out of the ‘unanswered’ queue.)
Make sticky post on save
This may only be part of the problem. That is quite a bit of code to read (and you should post relevant code inline so that the question is not dependent on an external site) and your description is a bit hard to follow, but… You should not be using a secondary query at all … Read more
Whenever an array of arguments is a function parameter in a WP core function it is parsed via wp_parse_args and almost always extracted into single variables. I.e. no, you cannot use the same argument twice. What you want to do is something like this: $exclude = get_option( ‘sticky_posts’ ); $exclude[] = get_the_ID(); $args = array( … Read more
ignore_sticky_posts was introduced in WordPress 3.1. Before this version, you can use caller_get_posts, which will have the same effect (this option was used when you queried the posts via get_posts(), which uses the same WP_Query class in the background, but should ignore sticky posts). The name was a bit confusing, and thus changed in 3.1.
As pointed out by @t31os in the comments, get_query_var(‘page’) should actually be get_query_var(‘paged’).
EDIT Here is another approach to the one in my ORIGINAL ANSWER. Instead of the need to alter the main query and $posts global to remove expired stickies, why not remove the posts entirely from being sticky, ie, unstick the posts which has expired. This way, we do not need to check for expired stickies … Read more