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Refining MTEntries with Primary and Secondary Categories

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I have a gallery with which I want to show entries in which the primary category is NOT Polls, even though Polls might be a secondary category.

So let's say I have these three entries:

Entry 1: Movies (primary), Polls
Entry 2: Polls (primary), Movies
Entry 3: Music (primary), Polls

I want the MTEntries loop to show entries 1 and 3, but not entry 2.

The current loop begins like this:

<mt:entries category="NOT Polls" lastn="5">

But that's too coarse; it excludes all three entries.

I've tried using the MTIfCategory tag within a loop to exclude entries in which Polls is the primary category, but in this example, it gives me three results, with the middle one being blank.

What are proper modifiers to accomplish what I'm looking for?

Reported on Movable Type 4.2

5 Replies

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  • Have you seen the third example under "Attributes" on this page?
    http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/entries.html

    It might work, if you don't have too many categories, to do:
    MTEntires category="Movies/Polls OR Music/Polls">

    I wonder if there's a wildcard feature?

    • Unless there's a "Polls" sub-category for every one of the "regular" ones(Movies, Music, etc), this is taking an unrelated approach.

  • CultureSnob: Can you paste in what you were trying with IfCategory, and also what exact version of MT are you using? Using IfCategory to test secondary categories was broken but was fixed in a branch whose ultimate version number I can't remember this second.

    • Su: I chucked the code when I realized why it was doing what it was doing. The code wasn't misbehaving; I used it in such a way that it didn't produce what I wanted.

      Basically, I told it to fetch 10 entries (the gallery only shows five, but the extra entries are meant to allow for some that will be excluded), and then it tested for the Polls category as primary, so it makes perfect sense that there would be a blank output for those particular entries.

      To the best of my recollection, it looked something like this:

      <mt:entries lastn="10">
      <mt:ifCategory name="Polls" type="primary">
      ----No output----
      <mt:else>
      ----Output----
      </mt:else>
      </mt:ifCategory>
      </mt:entries>
      

      This was on MT4.23 most likely. It might have been 4.24.

      Sue's idea wouldn't require a ton of work, but it's not very elegant.

  • I think the easiest work-around is a system @ tag for those items to be included or excluded.

    I think it would still be nice to be able to include and exclude based on primary and secondary category, though, e.g.: MTEntries primarycategory="NOT Polls".

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