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Categories

Produces a list of categories defined for the current blog.

Categories in this blog:
<mt:Categories glue=", ">
    <a href="<$mt:CategoryArchiveLink$>"><$mt:CategoryLabel$></a>
</mt:Categories>

This tag produces output for every category with no regard to their hierarchical structure. The results are sorted ascending by category label.

The tags mt:TopLevelCategories and mt:SubCategories may be more useful for complex listings of categories.

Attributes

MultiBlog attributes

glue

A string used to join the output of the separate iterations of MTCategories. This can be as simple as a comma and space (“, ”) to list out category labels or complex HTML markup to be inserted between the markup generated by MTCategories.

lastn

Limits output to the first N categories. N is a positive integer.

show_empty

Setting this optional attribute to true (1) will include categories with no entries assigned. The default is false (0), where only categories with entries assigned.

Examples

List out the categories used on at least one blog entry, separated by commas:

Categories: <mt:Categories glue=", "><$mt:CategoryLabel$></mt:Categories>

List all categories and link to categories if the category has one or more entries:

<mt:Categories show_empty="1">
    <mt:If name="__first__">
<ul>
    </mt:If>
    <mt:If tag="CategoryCount" gte="1">
    <li><a href="<$mt:CategoryArchiveLink$>"><$mt:CategoryLabel$></a></li>
    <mt:Else>
    <li><$mt:CategoryLabel$></li>
    </mt:If>
    <mt:If name="__last__">
</ul>
    </mt:If>
</mt:Categories>
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4 Comments

Jay Allen

Jay Allen on November 1, 2007, 6:55 p.m. Reply

This tag supports the MultiBlog template tag attributes blog_ids/include_blogs and exclude_blogs for aggregating across different blogs.

Beau Smith

Beau Smith on June 23, 2009, 1:51 p.m. Reply

Hack to manually order categories: http://www.beausmith.com/mt/2009/05/ordering-categories.php

Alan Z on August 18, 2010, 11:39 p.m. Reply

In the example at the top of page… 

<mt:Categories glue=", ">
             <a href="<$mt:CategoryArchiveLink$>"><$mt:CategoryLabel$></a>
</mt:Categories>

 <$mt:CategoryArchiveLink$> is DEPRECATED: Use <$mt:ArchiveLink$>

elkins.myid.net on October 14, 2010, 8:00 a.m. Reply

Beau’s trick for ordering Categories works great, but just a word of advice: if you use it, be sure to double-check your atom feed templates to make sure that every use of <MTCategoryLabel> has ‘strip_html=”1”’ appended to it. Some of the default feed templates that MT ships with neglected to do this, and without it, the HTML comment trick will mess up your feeds big time.

Having just wasted about two hours mucking about trying to figure out why my feeds weren’t working before I finally noticed what the problem was, I thought I’d best mention it here, in the hopes that it might save others the same aggravation. :)