Extension: Show Categories on Edit Page

Excellent! I’m sure others will find this helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Hi Nathan,

Neat little extension that one, well done. Just wondering though would it be possible to get the categories showing in a drop-down menu possibly? That way the limit could be a lot higher. Saying that though I do like what you did with the abbr tag, very neat 😊 Thanks for sharing too.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Sue & Mark. Thanks for the feedback. I just spotted a couple of issues with the extension, specifically that it conflicted with Ryan’s extension since it was using the same method name in response to the hook. I’ll nudge Ryan and see if he can change his method to something more unique as at present it matches the name of the hook.

I’ll re-post here once I’ve pushed the update live… I’ve also just knocked out a ‘Show entry views’ extension… much the same but it shows the number of views each entry has had in an additional column…

😊

I’ll re-post here once I’ve pushed the update live… I’ve also just knocked out a ‘Show entry views’ extension… much the same but it shows the number of views each entry has had in an additional column… 😊

Yep just noticed that one 😉 looking forward to it.

Any thoughts on the drop-down idea?

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ll be honest, I’m not convinced by the drop down select idea as it wouldn’t perform a function, or did I misunderstand? 😊

I’ll be honest, I’m not convinced by the drop down select idea as it wouldn’t perform a function, or did I misunderstand? 😊

Sort of and sort of not 😉

The reason I thought it might be a good idea is then you could show more categories at once. If a post has any more than about 5 categories then the column would start to get quite unusable so I just thought that by using a drop-down it would enable you to easily see all the categories assigned to that entry at once or at least a lot more in one go.

Admitted I don’t think this is the best option either as a drop-down to me seems more like it should have an action as opposed to just showing something but maybe you could put it in as an extension setting option?

The other thing I was thinking is some fancy shmancy javascript which builds on your abbr tag idea and instead when you hover over the categories and get the list shown the way it is now you could fade in a div which has all the categories shown there instead. It’s just that any entries that have lots and lots of categories may look odd in the way it is working now although I must admit I haven’t tested it out on a site where I do have lots of categories yet as I’m not at my main computer to be able to do that so it might turn out that it looks fine in which case I will shut-up! 😊

Just a few thoughts though.

Best wishes,

Mark

Very nice, thank you. FYI, seems to conflict with the Restrict Entries To Member Groups extension also, which adds a column to the Edit list to show if the entry is restricted.

Thanks for the heads up @smartpill, I think this may be the same issue that caused a conflict with Ryan’s extension. I’ve updated Github with a new version that should resolve this.

http://github.com/nathanpitman/np.show_categories.ee_addon/zipball/master

I’ll download the Restrict Entries extension and check though.

Though I am mostly PHP-illiterate, I was able to make each category appear with a <br /> after it. I could not figure out how to prepend a &middot; character though.

Hi expdesign, glad to hear you found a use for this extension. I’d be interested to see how the edit screen looks with <br’s> between categories, does it not end up makign the rows much taller??? 😊

Yes, the rows are a bit taller, but it’s ok. The benefit of seeing the categories outweighs the bloat.

I thought of a few options you could build in to your extension:

• Abbreviate categories
• Control over the table header, i.e., for one client I prefer it says “Departments”
• Option to prepend a character like a &middot;

Some excellent ideas there. Thanks for these… will see what I can do for you. 😊

Hi Nathan,

After upgrading to ExpressionEngine’s 1.6.8 build 20100121 I noticed that Show Categories extension does not work anymore. Instead a list of PHP errors is being shown on the top of Edit page. Those are such error messages as

Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166 Notice: Undefined index: entry_id in /home/classics/public_html/eesys/extensions/ext.np_show_categories.php on line 166

This is amazing extension; it would be nice if it were possible to use it with current and future builds.

ooh, how odd. I’ll take a look at this as I tend to use this extension quite a lot myself I’m going to run into the same problem at some point…. thanks for the heads up. I’ll post back here once I have a solution.