Text-indent nested category list
Plugins
I once had the problem that I needed to create a SAEF for a weblog which has three category groups. When using the standard {category_menu}{/category_menu} tag-pair all groups are merged into one which was not appropriate because the category groups did not belong together thematically.
Hence I hardcoded the category menus to show up in three separate select-lists.
However one category group had several levels of subcategories and I wanted to show them properly nested like in the list below:
I ended up with a plugin that transforms the HTML-output of {exp:weblog:categories style="nested"} into an indented text-only version.
To use the plugin just wrap its tags around a pair of {exp:weblog:categories}-tags.
The plugin will read its output into an array using xml_parse_into_struct(), remove the <ul></ul> and <li> </li> elements and prepend an indentation-string to the category_name according to the nesting-level.
Example:
<select name="category[]" size="8" multiple="multiple">
{exp:textnest fill="&nbsp;&nbsp;"}
{exp:weblog:categories weblog="directory" category_group="2" style="nested"}
<option value="{category_id}">{exp:xml_encode}{category_name}{/exp:xml_encode}</option>
{/exp:weblog:categories}
{/exp:textnest}
</select>
Optional parameter:
fill=""
Determines what string will be used to indent the subcategories. Defaults to .
P.S.: The output of {exp:weblog:categories} must be valid XML. If your categories may contain special characters, better enclose the {category_name} variable in {exp:xml_encode}{/exp:xml_encode}-tags.
You could also use this to indent the category selection drop-down menu described in the Knowledge Base.
<form name="catmenu" action="">
<select name="selcat"
onchange="location=document.catmenu.selcat.options[document.catmenu.selcat.selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="">--Select Category--</option>
{exp:textnest fill="&nbsp;&nbsp;"}
{exp:weblog:categories weblog="yourweblog" style="nested" dynamic="off"}
<option value="{path=weblog}">{category_name}</option>
{/exp:weblog:categories}
{/exp:textnest}
</select>
</form>
Download: pi.textnest.zip
