Top Posts & Pages Widget: Filter popular posts by category

The [Top Posts & Pages widget](https://jetpack.com/support/extra-sidebar-widgets/top-posts-pages-widget/) displays either the most liked posts or up to ten posts that have received the most traffic in the past 48 hours. The [customization options](https://jetpack.com/2016/01/12/hooks-customize-top-posts-pages-widget/) do not include filtering the widget by category or tag. Such a feature would be useful to show "Top Ten Podcasts" or "Top Ten News Stories", for example.

#### Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, the widget's configuration settings would have a similar categories checkbox to the post editor, allowing the user to select the categories that should be included right from the UI.

#### Describe alternatives you've considered

The [Top 10](https://wordpress.org/plugins/top-10/) plugin has a similar feature: "Exclusions: Exclude posts from select categories from appearing in the top posts list. Also exclude posts by ID from appearing in the list."

Read the linked Top Posts & Pages widget documentation and customization guide, then locate the widget's configuration and post-selection entry points in the Jetpack codebase. Define the category-selection behavior in the settings UI and verify that the displayed top posts are limited to the selected categories.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.