How do I display entries by Category

Question

The title may be deceiving and I may be missing something exceptionally obvious but I am trying to display a series of entries by category that link to external websites

The basic outcome should be like this:

Category 1

Site one
Site two
Site three

Category 2

Site four
Site five
Site six

I tried the basic Category Archive approach:

{exp:channel:category_archive channel="gardens" style="linear"}
    {categories}
        <h3>{category_name}</h3>
    {/categories}
        {entry_titles}
            <a href="{external_url}">{title}</a><br />
        {/entry_titles}
{/exp:channel:category_archive}

This gets the correct structure but it is looking for an internal reference and simply appends the external URL to the site url.

After some searching on StackExchange I found this option:

  {exp:channel:category_archive channel="botanical_gardens" style="linear"}
    {categories}
        <h3>{category_name}</h3>
        {exp:channel:entries channel="botanical_gardens"}
          <a href="{garden_url}">{title}</a><br />
        {/exp:channel:entries}
    {/categories}
  {/exp:channel:category_archive}

However it displays all the entries under each category. I need something that merges the functionality of these two options and allows the URL to be to an external site.

Answer 1

The reason the code you grabbed off SE is returning all entries under each category is that you haven't limited the inner loop by the category that the outer loop is currently in. You need to pass the category_id to the inner loop:

    {exp:channel:category_archive channel="botanical_gardens" style="linear"}
    {categories}
        <h3>{category_name}</h3>
        {exp:channel:entries channel="botanical_gardens" category="{category_id}" disable="member_data|pagination"}
          <a href="{garden_url}">{title}</a><br />
        {/exp:channel:entries}
    {/categories}
  {/exp:channel:category_archive}

The reason this approach is typically used is that the category archive tag doesn't return custom fields - which is what your URLs are stored in. This is why the field name is showing in the rendered HTML.

You'll also want to make sure you disable as much as you can on the inner loop as this nested loop approach can spawn a lot of queries. I've used it a number of times but if you are expecting 100's of categories with 1000's of entries I would look to a different organizational approach like relationships.

Answer 2

Your first attempt looks correct.

What format are the urls in the field you are using? If they don't contain http:// then it's likely to be assumed they are relative to the existing site.

An extension such as VZ URL extension could help you out here by ensuring that the url stored include the protocol.