Listing entries, ordering by Category

Question

I want to list a channel's entries by category. It's a kind of hybrid of using EE's category_archive tag but inside of exp:channel:entries. I have an ugly solution (shown here); it violates every DRY principle out there, but I don't know how to do it better.

The channel is a glorified list of links with explanation text and image.

---

The results I'd like to have:

Resource Page Title heading H1

Category A H2
Resource Link 1
Another Resource Link
And another

A different Category H2
Resource Link
Yet Another one
One more here

etc.

---

How the channel fields are set up:

{title} (obviously)

Channel fields
{resource_url_link} — Link to destination website
{resource_src_logo} — Destination website logo
{resource_rte_blurb} — Brief description of destination site

Note: {title_url} has no business in this channel. At all.

---

Option I considered but rejected:

Category Archive (link to EE Docs): Limited to only entry title and a path or entity akin to title_url, which will not work.

---

Ugly workable code/tags I'm using at the moment

(It is ugly, it violates DRY/Don't Repeat Yourself, but the total number of categories are limited so it's doable.)

For each category (see H2 tags), I hand-code category ID in the low_title item, and match that ID in the subsequent exp:channel:entries.

<h2>{exp:low_title:category category_id="7"}</h2>
    {exp:channel:entries channel="resources" disable="pagination|member_data|category_fields" category="7"}
    <div>
        <div><img alt="{title}" src="{resource_src_logo:medium}"></div>
        <div><h3><a href="{resource_url_link}">{title}</a></h3>{resource_rte_blurb}</div>
    </div>
    {/exp:channel:entries}

<h2>{exp:low_title:category category_id="10"}</h2>
    {exp:channel:entries channel="resources" disable="pagination|member_data|category_fields" category="10"}
    <div>
        <div><img alt="{title}" src="{resource_src_logo:medium}"></div>
        <div><h3><a href="{resource_url_link}">{title}</a></h3>{resource_rte_blurb}</div>
    </div>
    {/exp:channel:entries}

Do you know how I can do this better?

Answer 1

I had the same problem and found that the Stash solution was the best approach for this.

{exp:channel:entries channel="resources" dynamic="no" disable="pagination|member_data|category_fields"}
{exp:stash:append name="resources_{categories limit='1'}{category_id}{/categories}" parse="inward"}
 <div>
    <div><img alt="{title}" src="{resource_src_logo:medium}"></div>
    <div><h3><a href="{resource_url_link}">{title}</a></h3>{resource_rte_blurb}</div>
</div>
{/exp:stash:append}
{/exp:channel:entries}

{exp:channel:categories channel="resources" style="linear" disable="category_fields" show_empty="no"}
    <h2>{category_name}</h2>
    {exp:stash:get name="resources_{category_id}"}
{/exp:channel:categories}

Answer 2

If you're not opposed to using an add-on ee-garage's http://ee-garage.com/nsm-categories does exactly what you describe.

Answer 3

I'm not too sure on how to make the underlying code better - but the first way you could make this DRY would come with a bit of a performance hit

You could take the below and set this as a new template

<h2>{exp:low_title:category category_id="{embed:id}"}</h2>
{exp:channel:entries channel="resources" disable="pagination|member_data|category_fields" category="{embed:id}"}
<div>
    <div><img alt="{title}" src="{resource_src_logo:medium}"></div>
    <div><h3><a href="{resource_url_link}">{title}</a></h3>{resource_rte_blurb}</div>
</div>
{/exp:channel:entries}

And then in your existing template call it in such a fashion...

{embed="_embeds/.category-info" id="7"}
{embed="_embeds/.category-info" id="10"}

That would work pretty nicely, but as mentioned would have a performance hit with the embeds being used to this degree. That said, this is a nice example where embeds' ability to parse parameters is a nice thing.

---

My next method is completely made up, I'm not sure if any plugins exist to allow this but if they do you could achieve the same with less of a performance hit.

Firstly, we could set a Preload Replace variable of a comma separated values of the IDs you wish to use...

{preload_replace:pre_categories="7,10"}

Now, we would have a new snippet, for examples sake I'm calling this {sn_category-info}

{exp:counter:increment} {!-- this made up plugin would +1 each time the snippet is called --}
<h2>{exp:low_title:category category_id="{exp:comma_seperated:grab x="{exp:counter:return}" values="{pre_categories}"}"}</h2> {!-- This made up plugin would take the current count position, the comma separated list and find the x'th value, so on the first run 7, on the second 10 --}
{exp:channel:entries channel="resources" disable="pagination|member_data|category_fields" category="{exp:comma_seperated:grab x="{exp:counter:return}" values="{pre_categories}"}"}
<div>
    <div><img alt="{title}" src="{resource_src_logo:medium}"></div>
    <div><h3><a href="{resource_url_link}">{title}</a></h3>{resource_rte_blurb}</div>
</div>
{/exp:channel:entries}

A bit hypothetical, I understand, but those plugins should be relatively simple to write and I think it'd be pretty damn DRY and fast!

Answer 4

This is exactly what I wrote Category Entries for - you tell it what categories you want to list entries for, and it sorts them by the order that you specify. Omitting the list of categories simply ends up sorting by whatever categories are on the entries. The tag is otherwise identical to the {channel:entries} tag.

You end up extracting category information from the entries' {categories} loop, or through other mechanisms such as Category Info.

Example code to sort entries by three specified categories:

<ul>
  {exp:category_entries category="2|3|1" orderby="date"}
    <li>{title} {categories}{category_name}{/categories} - {entry_date}</li>
  {/exp:category_entries}
</ul>

If you need anything added to the tag, you can post a request in the support forum for it and I will add it.

Answer 5

This is the use case for which I wrote Category Sorted Entries Lite (free) and, later, Category Sorted Entries (commercial).

Check them out, as I think they'll accomplish what you need.

n.b. NSM Categories is another great add-on with very similar functionality. It handles advanced custom fields (Matrix/Playa) a bit better, but doesn't include as many options for sorting and filtering by different category groups.