Why can't we extend???
Development and Programming
I hope this is the correct place for this post first off.
I’m new to Expression Engine 2 but have been coding in codeigniter for some years now. Since about a month after it was released actually. One thing that I really like about codeigniter was the ability to extend the base libraries in a separate (under the application instead of the system directory) without worrying about upgrades to the system stepping on your custom extensions. I have seen the system/expressionengine/extensions directory but it seems to me that dir would get crushed if a newer version of expression engine were to be laid on top of the current one.
On a related topic, what happened to my constants file??? The organization of codeigniter was excellent, why were these “pre-organization” features removed for expression engine?
Oh, and one more complaint that’s not really related. Can we please have a channel:categories and category_name tag that simply returns us the data without any HTML? No offense, but the list I get is not formatted correctly for my purposes and I’m using a template that requires PHP be turned on on the input side so I can’t strip the stupid tags out! Why is EE presuming to know what my list should look like?
I’m done now! Any answers to any of this gripes is appreciated.
Oh, and one more complaint that’s not really related. Can we please have a channel:categories and category_name tag that simply returns us the data without any HTML? No offense, but the list I get is not formatted correctly for my purposes and I’m using a template that requires PHP be turned on on the input side so I can’t strip the stupid tags out! Why is EE presuming to know what my list should look like?
If you use the style=”linear” tag parameter that will output plain text with no HTML…
{exp:channel:categories style="linear"}
{category_name}
{/exp:channel:categories}… you can then choose whatever HTML formatting you want.
Ok, one more issue. Why is the cat_group link to the channels in the database done as a pipe delimited list????? IMHO, there should be a exp_channels_categories table to build the correlation. That way I could use an optimized query to get all the data I need at once in PHP rather than pulling out the cat_group from exp_channels and exploding it so that I can then use those values to get my category names.
Am I missing something here? Yes, I realize there are tags to do that, but they have that blasted HTML embedded in it!
For all of my complaining here, I am mostly happy with what EE2 has to offer so please don’t read this as a slam on the overall product.
Thanks bluedreamer, I swear that I tried that yesterday and saw li’s in there! I take back my slam on the channel:categories category tag!! 😊
FYI when using category_archive with a linear style…
If you have nested categories with the same category name, the duplicate names will get stripped out of the results. Using linear also breaks the nesting and returns all the categories and child categories in alpha or by id so any nesting order is gone.
I ended up stripping out the ul/li pairs with low_replace and injecting my own in the {categories} loop.
Here’s more on the topic: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/186453/