How to quickly grab an entry's category (and child categories)

Question

EE experts --

I must be missing something. It seems that the only way to grab the categories for an entry is via a sub-query, using GWcode, for instance. Categories are not readily available like they would be for custom fields or {title}.

This is a big pain for a few reasons. Take a site, like the site I am developing for a client -- a craigslist spin-off. Every entry has a category (Events, Free, etc). Each entry also has a Location category. Seattle (child), Washington (parent category).

Now, whenever I list entries from search results, etc, I have to use a pliugin (EE's favorite answer) to list the category and location of the entry.

This completely destroys performance. So I talk to EE support, they say my code looks good, try caching. Fine. Caching is a reasonable answer. It works well enough for this, but not always. Anytime, anywhere I need to list entries in a custom query (for the current_user, for example) I get slammed by this bottleneck.

Maybe my question is about caching? Can anyone here speak to the larger issue? This is likely my last project in EE because of this issue. Is a design flaw in my structure? Surely I'm not alone on this?

Answer 1

Doesn't the {categories} tag pair work with search results?

You can restrict the categories by group, or exclude some categories if you don't want them to show up. I use gwcode in some situations, but most of the time this tag pair takes care of things.

Check the docs here: http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/channel_entries.html#variable-pairs

Hope this helps.