Thread

First off, thanks in advance, you guys all rock. 

Here’s my issue.. I’m trying to do something seemingly simple.. write a template that will display the contents of a weblog (an artists “works”), in a grid, but ONLY works that fulfill a condition (are “Available”).  I’ve tried this a number of different ways, but seem to keep running into an issue around php / template processing order.  The results are simply not consistent.

Here’s my code:

<h3>AVAILABLE WORKS</h3>
<p><?php <br />
$counter = 0;<br />
?><br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="6" align="center"><tr><br />
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="titus_works" sort="asc"}</p>

<p>    {if work_status == "Available"}<br />
        <td valign="top"><a href="http://{url_title_path=" target="_self" rel="noopener">{work_thumbnail}</a></td><br />
        <?php<br />
            echo $counter;<br />
            if (($counter % 5) == 0) {<br />
                echo '</tr></table><table cellpadding="6" align="center"><tr>';<br />
            }<br />
            $counter++;<br />
        ?><br />
    {/if}<br />
{/exp:weblog:entries}<br />
</tr></table>

Trouble seems to be centering around the “if work_status” line..it it incrementing “counter” on every loop, NOT just on the loops where the work is “Available”.

Is there something dumb i’m missing here, or a different way to accomplish the same?  I was getting strange results when i did it the “easy” way too, with

{if count == 5 || count == 10 ..etc }

I could probably get that way to work, but the “%” php method is so much more elegant.

Thoughts?

You only want to display entries where work_status=“Available”, correct? If so, why not simply use

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="titus_works" search:work_status="=Available" disable="..."

Also, moving to Howto.

not to mention that you could avoid using php entirely and just use a {switch} tag to output something on every 5th row.

Ah hah!  Working like a charm — I hadn’t had to use the “search” parameter yet, it all makes sense. 

Thanks!

Glad to hear it 😊 Please don’t hesitate to post again as needed.

I just happened on this thread and I was hoping to explain what was going on here.  Let’s take your pared down code:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="titus_works" sort="asc"}

    {if work_status == "Available"}
        <td valign="top"><a href="http://{url_title_path=" target="_self" rel="noopener">{work_thumbnail}</a></td>
    {/if}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Nevermind the counter for now.  What happens here is that ExpressionEngine first pulls your entries based on your parameters.  In this case that is going to be the oldest (sort=“asc”) 100 entries entries in the titus_works weblog.

Now it has those entries.  Because of your conditional it is only going to show those that have the work_status of available.  Now, your counter is actually going to act on the total output based on the parameters, and simply hide the ones based on your conditional.

switch= would have the same issue.

The reason the search: parameter works is because it is pulling the entries in an already limited fashion based on what that parameter says - so you’ll only ever get entries with an Available status, so the switch or counter is consistent.

Anyhow, I wanted you to understand this fully so it makes sense. Glad you have a solution!