Top ten most used attributes for category/channel tags?

Question

I'm a novice at EE development. Can anyone suggest the top ten (or any number) of the most used attributes for most channel:entries/category tags? Scrolling through the docs seems overwhelming at times.

I spent several hours wrestling with a channel tag to show related articles within an entry level page layout only to find a simple related_categories_mode="yes" was enough to do exactly what I wanted. Any help is appreciated, forgive me if this is not how this works or if this is the wrong place to ask.

Answer 1

Not in order of importance (because we all know channel= is #1)

Channel Entries

1. cache=, refresh= Enables tag caching. Refresh is the number of minutes between cache refreshes.
2. category= Categories are specified by ID number (the ID number of each category is displayed in the Control Panel).
3. category_group= Category Groups are specified by ID number (the ID number of each category group is displayed in the Control Panel).
4. channel= From which channel to show the entries (will show all channels if no channel is specified).
5. dynamic= Use this tag if you need to display content independent of URL title but still from the same channel.
6. disable= Allows you to turn off aspects of the tag that you might not be using in order to improve performance.
7. entry_id= You can hard code the channel tag to show a specific channel entry.
8. limit= Limits the number of entries on any given page.
9. paginate= For use with entry pagination and determines where the pagination code will appear for your channel entries.
10. url_title= This parameter limits the query by an entry’s url_title.

--Some examples--

A simple subpage:

{exp:channel:entries channel="subpage" limit="1" disable="member_data|pagination" cache="yes" refresh="10"}

A blog listing page w/ categories using the Low Seg2Cat plugin for category:

{exp:channel:entries channel="blog" disable="member_data" limit="6" dynamic="no" category="{segment_3_category_id}" cache="yes" refresh="60"}

Header/Footer Resources: You want dynamic set to no since the URL isn't determining what content to show:

{exp:channel:entries channel="header_footer" disable="member_data|pagination" cache="yes" refresh="10" dynamic="no"}

Channel Categories

1. backspace= Backspacing removes characters (including spaces and line breaks) from the last iteration of the loop.
2. channel= From which channel to show the entries (will show all channels if no channel is specified).
3. show= You can specify which categories will be included in the list.
4. show_empty= This parameter determines whether or not categories that contain no entries for the specific channel are displayed.
5. show_expired= Determines whether expired entries are included.
6. show_future_entries= Determines whether entries dated in the "future" to are included.
7. style= There are two list "styles" for your categories: "nested" and "linear".

--Some examples--

Simple category listing: You can use backspace here if you've got something like ", " separating each one:

{exp:channel:categories style="linear" category_group="1" backspace="2"}

{exp:channel:categories style="linear" show="1|13|14|15|25"}