Thread

I think this should be a really simple one, I am displaying a list of categories in a sidebar of a news page using the categories tag. I have set the show_empty=“no” so that any empty categories do not display, but i want to set a conditional to not display the static heading above if there are no categories displaying in the navigation, ideally I would like to hide the section tags as well, this is the code I have at the moment:

<section>
    <h2>News Categories</h2>
<p>    {exp:channel:categories channel="news_articles" show_empty="no"}<br />
    <a href="http://{path=news}">{category_name}</a><br />
    {/exp:channel:categories}<br />
</section>

I am thinking I will need to wrap the section tags and heading in either a channel entries tag or categories tag to then set the conditional but this seems quite over the top to do such a simple thing.

Any other ideas would be great.

Gareth

You should be able to use a conditional here:

{exp:channel:categories channel="news_articles" show_empty="no"}
{if count == "1"}
  <section>
  <h2>News Categories</h2>
<p>{/if}<br />
<a href="http://{path=news}">{category_name}</a><br />
{if count == total_results"}<br />
  </section><br />
{/if}    <br />
{/exp:channel:categories}

Thanks for this Rob, it almost works perfectly. The only problem now is that the section and heading are output wrapped in an unordered list. I have set the style to linear and added the ul’s between the conditional and it seems to work great now. My code is:

{exp:channel:categories channel="news_articles" show_empty="no" style="linear"}
  {if count == "1"}
  <section>
    <h2>News Categories</h2>
<p>    <ul><br />
   {/if} <br />
    <li><a href="http://{path=news}">{category_name}</a></li><br />
  {if count == "total_results"}<br />
    </ul><br />
  </section><br />
  {/if}<br />
  {/exp:channel:categories}

Thank’s for the help, I haven’t used the count variable very much and that is a clever use of it.

Ah yes, sorry I missed “linear” output! At least you got there 😊

The count variable is very useful!