Thread

I have a pretty tricky categories tag question. Basically I’m wanting to create category menu for a blog that only shows a category in that menu if it is selected in a post that also has another specific category checked.

Hi James,

I’m not quite sure I follow. Could you give me an example of how this would look on your site?

I managed to solve it with a custom query. But I do have a question… Why is it so difficult to get a query inserted into an EE tag parameter? I ended up using this obscure plugin (see my code below). Is there an easier way?

<ul>
{exp:ab_entry_ids col_name="cat_id" sql="SELECT DISTINCT cat_id FROM exp_category_posts WHERE cat_id <> 106 AND entry_id in (SELECT entry_id FROM exp_category_posts WHERE cat_id = 106)"}
{exp:channel:categories style="linear" channel="blog" show="{ab_entry_ids}"}
<li><a href="/slic/blog/category/{category_url_title}">{category_name}</a></li>
{/exp:channel:categories}
{/exp:ab_entry_ids}
</ul>

It shouldn’t be difficult at all. If you wrap the Query tags around the Channel Categories tag and be smart about it (make sure the query is limited to a single response), then you should be able to just insert the result in the format of {col_name} within the Query tags. What were you trying that didn’t work?

Well the main thing is that it isn’t a single response. As you can see in my query it will return all category id’s that meet that criteria. So when I was using the query module at first I was trying to put the entire query tag in the channel:categories show parameter. Of course that doesn’t work. But I could find an easy way to take my output of the query module and dump it into a parameter. Like I said, that add-on I am using does the trick… but isn’t super elegant.

Glad to find out we’re sitting in the same room right now, James! With much thanks to Low for the tip here, try this instead:

<ul>
{exp:query sql="SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT cat_id SEPARATOR '|') cat_ids FROM exp_category_posts WHERE cat_id <> 106 AND entry_id in (SELECT entry_id FROM exp_category_posts WHERE cat_id = 106)"}
{exp:channel:categories style="linear" channel="blog" show="{cat_ids}"}
<li><a href="/slic/blog/category/{category_url_title}">{category_name}</a></li>
{/exp:channel:categories}
{/exp:query}
</ul>

That work?

Thanks Kevin. I tried the suggestion with putting the entire {exp:query} tag in the parameter but changing the quotes and that worked as well. I probably should have realized that in the beginning! Thanks again for the help.

No problem! I’m so glad we got this figured out.

Have a good one.