Thread

Does anyone know how to limit a category field. Normall with a channel tag I can add limit=“1” and it works fine. Doesn’t seem to work with the category tag. Any Ideas?

Consider:

{categories show="4|7"}

or

{categories limit="1"}

or by group or ID.
More info >

Thanks lebisol. Does that helpLCBC Church?

For some reason the limit=“1” method doesn’t seem to be working. It is listing all the categories in the group I designated.

Here’s the code in question:

{exp:channel:categories channel="gathering" category_group="5" limit="1"}
<a href="http://{homepage}media/cat/{url_title}">{series-ad}</a>
{/exp:channel:categories}

My version of EE is: v2.1.1

Any help you can provide would be helpful, thanks!

And here is the page I am talking about, http://www.lcbcchurchblogs.com/resources/cat/all-church/, the ads on the right column that are square with rounded corners. Only “Preachers, serial killers and me” should be showing.

Have you tried something like this?

{exp:channel:categories channel="gathering" category_group="5"}
{if count == 1}
<a href="http://{homepage}media/cat/{url_title}">{series-ad}</a>
{/if}
{/exp:channel:categories}

Should basically show the same output compared to using limit=“1” (which is not a valid paramater looking at the docs).

Brilliant! That worked, though it feels like a bit of a hack. Does “limit” not work with the categories tag?

Brilliant! That worked, though it feels like a bit of a hack. Does “limit” not work with the categories tag?

Glad it helped 😊

It’s not a hack, but in this case, it’s not the “best” solution because it fetches all categories for category group with ID 5..loops through all of them and then only displays the first category from that list.

This would be better. If you know the category ID for the ad you’d like to display, you can use this:

{exp:channel:categories channel="gathering" category_group="5" show="3"}
<a href="http://{homepage}media/cat/{url_title}">{series-ad}</a>
{/exp:channel:categories}

Now, it will only fetch the category with ID 3 from the category group with ID 5, so it’s more efficient, especially if there are a lot of categories in that category group.
The limit paramater doesn’t exist for the exp:channel:categories tag, as you can see here:
http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/categories.html#parameters

There are always several methods to achieve what you want with EE, which is a good thing! 😊

Cheers,
Leon

Huh, it’s frustrating that the limit parameter isn’t included with the categories tag. That would have solved everything here. I really just need to display the most recent category. I guess if I had to do the site over again I would use a channel instead of category for our sermon series. Categories just seemed to make more sense when thinking about it at first. Thanks again for the quick response, this issue was driving me nuts!

...it’s frustrating that the limit parameter isn’t included with the categories tag

Why would it be? You are presenting entries and there IS a parameter to limit number of entries that will return.
If you know what the category you want then you can just hand pick its ID (and you do not need category group specified since every cat has unique ID)...and done, no need for IF statement.

Channels (old weblogs) vs. Categories is one of the first questions to be answered when planning the site…I know it doesn’t help now but for feature reference here is a link.

Hi LCBC Church,

Glad that you got this sorted out. Please post back if required.

@Leon, lebisol, thanks very much for the help.

Cheers

Greg