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filter articles according to both categories?
If I assign each article two categories, in this case category1 representing type and category2 representing location, what would I enter into the address-line to filter by both?
I can do www.mysite.com/animals?c=birds to list all birds anywhere and www.mysite.com/animals?c=england to list all animals in england, but what does one enter to filter for all birds in england?
I know that chh_article_custom can filter according to both but not how to link to or “call” this page. Is there some syntax I’ve overlooked or do I have to investigate using something like chs_ifurlvar or chs_cookie to pass information to a following page and then build different chh_article_custom tags depending upon the variable passed?
Any tips or alternative suggestions welcome!
jakob
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#2 2006-03-05 18:02:39
- els
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- From: The Netherlands
- Registered: 2004-06-06
- Posts: 7,458
Re: filter articles according to both categories?
You may well have found a solution in the meantime, if so ignore this, but as Textpattern as far as I know doesn’t have a way to do this, my choice would be the chs_ifurlvar plugin.
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Re: filter articles according to both categories?
yes, with quite some experimentation, chh_article_custom, chs_ifurlvar and a tiny extra function to output the value of the GET var, I’ve cobbled together a two category filter that can be controlled through the URL according to the pattern:
<notextile> URL + ?c1=___&?c2=___ </notextile>
with the help of 2 extra mod_rewrite rules in the htaccess I can simplify this to a ‘guessable’ clean url:
www.mysite.com/section/category/c1/c2
I use 2 drop-down (select) lists with select name=“c1” and select name=“c2” to create these urls and the function catches the different url combinations and filters accordingly.
1. Additional plug-in function which simply outputs the value of the requested urlvar, used later to output the searched for categories c1 and c2 (I installed chs_ifurlvar, went into the plugin code and added this function):
<code>
function chs_output_urlval($atts) {
$thevar = ($atts[“var”]) ? $atts[“var”] : “function”;
return ($_GET[$thevar]) ? $_GET[$thevar] : “”;
}
</code>
2. On the listpage, get the values of urlvars c1 and c2, test which are present and construct the filter-by category=“string” for chh_article_custom accordingly, then call chh_article_custom using this filter-by string:
<code>
<txp:php>
$chscat1=chs_output_urlval(array(“var”=>“c1”));
$chscat2=chs_output_urlval(array(“var”=>“c2”));
if ($chscat1 !==”“ and $chscat2 !==”“) { $chscat=”$chscat1&$chscat2”; }
elseif ($chscat1 !==”“) { $chscat=”$chscat1”; }
elseif ($chscat2 !==”“) { $chscat=”$chscat2”; }
else { $chscat=”?”; }
echo chh_article_custom(array(
“section”=>”?”,
“category”=>”$chscat”,
“listform”=>“myform”,
“children”=>“y”
));
</txp:php>
</code>
3. Additional mod_rewrite rules for …/category/c1/c2 clean urls, added after the other RewriteRule entries in the textpattern root directory .htaccess:
<notextile><code>
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/category/([^/]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c=$2 [L]</code></notextile>
<notextile><code>RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/category/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ index.php?s=$1&c1=$2&c2=$3 [L]
</code></notextile>
It’s not elegant code but it works (for me at least). I’m sure someone more savvy in php than I can tell me how to achieve this better or streamline the code and mod_rewrite rules. Theoretically if chh_article_custom could also ‘sense’ ?c1= and ?c2= like it can with ?c= then this would be unnecessary.
What does not (as yet) work is filtering by two categories when one of them is a parent-category. This is not (yet) a feature of chh_article_custom. To avoid getting no results, I only present the child categories as options in the select list.
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