Staggered Category List

By Arvind Satyanarayan on January 6, 2005 | Filed under Hacks | Comments (23)

UPDATE: No more CSS, have MT auto indent.

The "Primary Category" drop down menu just lists the categories sorted alphabetically and doesn't obey the category heirarchies you may have setup. This is especially annoying if you have several similarly named sub categories under different parent categories. So here's a hack that will change the way that field works, the categories will now obey the category heirarchy as shown in the screenshot (click for a larger view) It's probably best to note that I'm not the most perl savvy and this code may not be the most efficient/quickest/best way to do it but it works for me.

You'll need CMS.pm, open it up. Replace everything between

## Load categories and process into loop for category pull-down.

## Now load user's preferences and customization for new/edit ## entry page.

(found approximately on line number 965) with this

## Load categories and process into loop for category pull-down.
require MT::Category;
my $iter = MT::Category->load_iter({ blog_id => $blog_id });
my $cols = MT::Category->column_names;
my @data;
my $cat_id = $param{category_id};
my @cats = MT::Category->_flattened_category_hierarchy ($blog_id);
my $depth = 0;
my $i = 1;
while (my $obj = $iter->()) {
while (my $obj = shift @cats) {
my $row = { };
if (!ref ($obj)) {
if ($obj eq 'BEGIN_SUBCATS') {
$depth++;
} elsif ($obj eq 'END_SUBCATS') {
$depth--;
}
# $row->{$obj} = 1;
# push @data, $row;
next;
}
for my $col (@$cols) {
$row->{'category_' . $col} = $obj->$col();
}
$row->{category_pixel_depth} = $depth;
$row->{category_label} = ("    " x $depth) . $row->{category_label};
$row->{category_is_selected} = 1
if $cat_id && $cat_id == $obj->id;
push @data, $row;
}
}
#@data = sort { $a->{category_label} cmp $b->{category_label} }
# @data;
my $top = { category_id => '',
category_label => $app->translate('Select') };
$top->{category_is_selected} = 1 unless $cat_id;
unshift @data, $top;
$param{category_loop} = \@data;

## Now load user's preferences and customization for new/edit
## entry page.

Save CMS.pm and upload it. If you followed the previous version of this tutorial that handled this with CSS, copy over the line in red above. Thanks to Scott for the solution.

23 Comments

Scott Houchin said:
on Jan 5, 2005 10:59 PM | Reply

I tried this, but found that it didn't work in IE 6 on Windows. It worked on Firefox so I'm assumeing that Windows doesn't support the margins in the option tag.

I got around this by inserting non-breaking spaces in the option tag contents instead of styling it:

$row->{categorypixeldepth} = $depth; $row->{categorylabel} = (" " x $depth) . $row->{categorylabel};

(that's four non-breaking spaces in that string)

With this solution, I didn't need to modify edit_entry.tmpl

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