Category Levels 0.2.0 Released
I’ve released Category Levels 0.2.0. You can now remove categories from the category list in the sidebar, if the user does not have sufficient privileges. You can also customize the showing of padlock and user levels independently.
There’s still one outstanding issue: If you show the number of posts next to the monthly archives, the total will not be reduced by the number of hidden posts. I’ve submitted a feature request to the Wordpress folks so that I can implement this.
The hiding categories functionality requires Wordpress 1.5.2. The plugin should work otherwise for prior versions of Wordpress.
Get the new version here.