Textpattern Support Forum

Sounds like it ought to be a simple problem, and yet I can’t come up with a simple solution as you have stated it. artagesw’s solution is certainly simple if you are willing to use a category as suggested, and the minor duplication of effort that entails. Otherwise I think you’re looking at a plugin. I don’t know if any of the existing article_custom plugins do this out of the box (select on a custom field), but the mod shouldn’t be difficult.

Recently I’ve had a couple of occasions to use a different solution to the same kind of problem. (I learned it from net-carver.) It involves creating a temporary table with only the articles you want, letting article or article_custom use that, then discarding the temporary table. It’s actually quite a light-weight solution compared to a typical article_custom plugin, which is likely to involve duplicating a significant chunk of Txp code. I might even make a plugin along these lines…

maniqui wrote:

This may be a solution (not tested):

Yep, ofcourse that works – or kinda. Reasons:

• You can’t really use the limit.
• Your sort just gets the videos with the lowest id/order by alphabet, not by date.

But you have to remember that this method is really slow compared to one single query. Not to mention that it will have to fetch all articles if you want to sort them by posting date and then parse and check every one of them – which will take for ever and ever.

One way to make maniqui’s code to work is to name the videos by the upload date which could arrange the videos correctly.

And the stupid way is to remove the limit, sort them by posted and…

<txp:article_custom limit="9999" sort="posted desc">
	<txp:if_custom_field name="video_id">
	</txp:if_custom_field>
</txp:article_custom>

…just wait the list to generate itself. Probably it will even kill the cheap shared host. The limit then could be done by using <txp:variable /> tags or by counting plugins. Which will make it even slower.

Or then you could do two seperate queries. Get the IDs and then serve them to the article_custom. For example:

<txp:php>
	$rs = safe_column('ID','textpattern',"custom_3 != '' ORDER BY Posted desc LIMIT 0, 3");
	if($rs) echo implode(',',$rs);
</txp:php>

But it’s too really dumb, because it a) uses two queries b) uses PHP c) still is slow.

Last edited by Gocom (2009-07-03 03:29:09)

Hi colak,

that’s exactly the same (but just one difference: you did it using txp:article_custom as container tag) that alannie has already done (check her first post). Or am I missing something?

Hi Julián it is very much it and I cannot see why the original code alannie posted doesn’t work.

I guess what confuses me is <txp:article_custom limit="3" form="video_list" video_id="???" /> as I can not understand why video_id="???" is needed. The code I and alannie posted should only list the 3 latest articles whose custom field named video_id is populated.