Hi there. Our company is confused as to how a blog entry is categorized. When I choose multiple categories that my blog applies to, only one or sometimes none of them are included in the URL. I also don’t know if keywords or tags are better. The main issue is how the blogs fall into one category (for instance we sell surveillance cameras, so one category is “security” and another is “crime”, and sometimes I’ll choose both). If I select both, only one will show up, sometimes neither. Help! Thanks!
How Movable Type Blogs Use Entry Categories
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Dan Wolfgang
Dan is an engineering creative and uses his vast knowledge of the web to solve unique client problems with specialized solutions. Complex or straightforward, his focus is to find the most efficient, functional, elegant, and stable solutions for each project. 10 years in web engineering and 14 more in the print publishing industry give him a special insight to the needs, restrictions, and workflows of content publishers, both traditional and new media. Dan is an active Movable Type community member who has written and contributed to countless plugins including some of the most popular: More Custom Fields, Poll Position, and Asset Image Quality.
Twitter: @danwolfgang
Dan Wolfgang on February 24, 2014, 9:18 a.m. Reply
From the sound of it, you may have multiple individual entry archive types defined or multiple mappings of the individual entry archive type, and perhaps those are being confused? Go to Design > Templates and find the Archive Templates section, where you’ll likely see a template named “Entry.” Click it, then find Template Options and Archive Mapping. The path shown here dictates what the URL looks like — by default, it’s
yyyy/mm/entry-basename.html, and as you can see that doesn’t include the category name. You can change this by choosing a different mapping from the drop down; perhapscategory/sub-category/entry-basename.htmlis more suited to the result you want. (You’ll need to republish the blog after making such a big change… but note my disclaimer below, first.)Note that the URL will only show one category — the primary category. On the Edit Entry scree, when you assign categories, notice that one of them gets a small green star to identify it as the primary category.
I realize this information isn’t necessarily a clear solution to your problem. Without having more in-depth knowledge about how your site is configured I can’t offer insight about how to make changes or what impact they will have on the rest of the site. But, maybe this is enough to get started.