Thread

I am displaying some entries from a channel that has the following fields:

title
news_item_date
document_file

I am only displaying the month and year of the date and this date is used as a heading.

More than one entry may have the same date (month and year) and I would like to display the entries with just one heading.

So instead of

August 2011

Title 1

August 2011

Title 2

July 2011

Title 3

I want the following:

August 2011

Title 1

Title 2

July 2011

Title 3

Hence the month heading is only listed once for each month.

My code is as follows:

{exp:channel:entries  channel="business_immigration_news"  orderby="news_item_date" sort="desc"  limit="15"}

    <h3>{news_item_date format="%F %Y"}</h3><p>                </p>

<p>    <h3 class="documentTitle"><a href="http://{document_file}" title="Download file" target="_blank" rel="noopener">{title}</a></h3>                    <br />
                <br />
{/exp:channel:entries}

Any advice on how to achieve this would be appreciated.

Thanks

Paul

hi Paul,

take a look at the {date_heading} tag variable

{exp:channel:entries  channel="business_immigration_news"  orderby="news_item_date" sort="desc"  limit="15"}

{date_heading display="daily"}
<h3>{news_item_date format="%F %Y"}</h3><p>     </p>

<p>{/date_heading}<br />
               </p>

<p>    <h3 class="documentTitle"><a href="http://{document_file}" title="Download file" target="_blank" rel="noopener">{title}</a></h3>                    <br />
                <br />
{/exp:channel:entries}

Thanks John

I have had a look at this and it appears it uses the Entry Date as the basis for breaking up the entries. I need it to use my custom date variable (news_item_date) which I cannot see how to do using the date_heading.

Look forward to your reply.

Paul

Hi, Mediakitchen.

You can’t. You’d need to use the entry date in order for this to work.

Ah that is a shame as it was so close to being a perfect solution. Does this mean I may have to roll my own solution using PHP? If so, any tips? 😊

Hi Mediakitchen,

That, or perhaps a custom query that can group by the dates. I’ll move this over to Community Help to get you further input, as it’s a good question. Thanks!

Thanks Brandon - a bit out my depth with SQL but perhaps the following will assist someone helping me come up with a solution:

SELECT 
    DATENAME(mm, article.Created) AS Month, 
    DATENAME(yyyy, article.Created) AS Year, 
    COUNT(*) AS Total 
FROM Articles AS article 
GROUP BY 
    DATENAME(mm, article.Created), 
    DATENAME(yyyy, article.Created) 
ORDER BY Month, Year DESC

Hi Paul,

For this instance I would use PHP, so enable PHP and use the following code:

<? var $t = ""; //initialize variable ?>

{exp:channel:entries  channel="business_immigration_news"  orderby="news_item_date" sort="desc"  limit="15"}
<? 
if($t == "{news_item_date format='%F %Y'}"){    }
else { 
    $t = "{news_item_date format='%F %Y'}"; 
     echo "<h3>".$t."</h3><p>";<br />
} ?><br />
                <br />
<h3 class="documentTitle"><a href="http://{document_file}" title="Download file" target="_blank" rel="noopener">{title}</a></h3>                    <br />
                <br />
{/exp:channel:entries}

So, it will only post the date when it’s different from the previous date.

Thank you so much - that worked perfectly!! (apart from it didn’t like “var” so I just removed it)

Really appreciate the help.

Many thanks

Paul

p.s if anyone has same issue, be sure to set PHP Parsing Stage to Output