Simple Shortcodes

Thanks for your interest in the plugin, for your comments and for your suggestions. The Documentation issues have come up before, and you may find these earlier topics useful:

Newbies

Is there doc that shows how to use this plugin?

Since your suggestions include category and tag examples, you may also be interested in this topic:

Question for Media Library Assistant users

Categories and Tags are built-in WordPress “taxonomies” and have been used for a long time to organize posts and pages. WordPress does not have built-in support for using them with attachments, and that was one of the original motivations for MLA.

With MLA you can extend Categories and Tags support to attachments. MLA also provides two additional taxonomies for your convenience, Att. Categories and Att. Tags. Because of the way WordPress works, using Categories and Tags for attachments as well as posts and pages can be complicated, so many people find that using the separate Att. Categories and Att. Tags is more convenient.

To use a taxonomy you must create one or more “terms” within it. For example, you could create terms in the Category taxonomy like “Big Dog” and “Little Dog”. For each term, WordPress automatically creates a “slug”, e.g., “big-dog” and “little-dog” for the previous examples. Removing capital letters, spaces and punctuation makes it easier to organize and search the database. It’s the slug you can use in [mla_gallery] shortcodes.

Your first suggestions say “display the contents of a single category/tag“. I understand that to mean “display the attachments that have been assigned to a single category/tag”. The easiest way to do this is by slug; for the four taxonomies we’ve discussed:

• Categories: [mla_gallery category_name=big-dog]
• Tags: [mla_gallery tag=big-dog]
• Att. Categories: [mla_gallery attachment_category=big-dog]
• Att. Tags: [mla_gallery attachment_tag=big-dog]

The category_name example does not follow the general rule of “taxonomy-slug = term-slug” because it was created long ago, when Categories and Tags were the only taxonomies allowed.

Your third and fourth suggestions are more complicated. Two questions come to mind:

1. You can use the [mla_tag_cloud] shortcode to display the term Titles in a variety of ways, but there is no support in WordPress or MLA for term “thumbnails” or any way to designate a term’s “main image”. What do you imagine the main image would be?
2. What, if anything, should happen when you click on one of the term Titles/thumbnails? WordPress supports “archive pages” for posts and pages, but there is no built-in support for “attachment archive pages”.

The most common answer to the second question is “go to a page that displays a gallery of the attachments assigned to the term.” If that’s what you want, you will have to create the page and set up an [mla_gallery] shortcode on the page to display the results. The examples in the Documentation do that, but they are complicated by including the logic required to divide the resulting gallery into pages. I can develop a simpler, single-page version of the example if that would help you.

Thanks again for your interest and your patience in reading through this response. If you can answer the two questions above I would be happy to work on an answer to your specific needs. I will leave this topic unresolved until I hear back from you.

Thank you for your kind words (I didn’t take your original post as harsh), this response and the additional details for your suggestions.

With regard to your points:

1. The [mla_tag_cloud] term titles are displayed as the usual cloud with varying sized text depending on popularity. You can customize the display in many ways; list and grid outputs are available, varying size can be changed, etc. The current MLA version does not support thumbnail images, but I will consider this for a future enhancement, and I will look at the NextGen example.
2. I have included single-page and paginated examples below.

Here is an example for a standard cloud that displays a single-page gallery when a term is clicked:

[mla_tag_cloud taxonomy=category number=0 mla_link_href="{+page_url+}?term_slug={+slug+}"]

[mla_gallery category_name="{+request:term_slug+}"]

The interesting part of this example is mla_link_href="{+page_url+}?term_slug={+slug+}". That parameter makes the link assigned to each term go back to the current page, adding a term_slug argument to the URL. The term_slug is used to filter the [mla_gallery] display.

To display a “grid” instead of a cloud, add a few parameters:

[mla_tag_cloud mla_output=grid smallest=10 largest=10 columns=5 taxonomy=category number=0 mla_link_href="{+page_url+}?term_slug={+slug+}"]

[mla_gallery category_name="{+request:term_slug+}"]

To paginate the gallery, add posts_per_page and previous/next controls below the display:

[mla_tag_cloud mla_output=grid smallest=10 largest=10 columns=5 taxonomy=category number=0 mla_link_href="{+page_url+}?term_slug={+slug+}"]

[mla_gallery category_name="{+request:term_slug+}" posts_per_page=2 ]

<div style="clear: both; float: left">
[mla_gallery category_name="{+request:term_slug+}" posts_per_page=2 mla_output="previous_page,first" mla_link_text='&larr;' mla_rollover_text="Previous/first page"]
</div>
<div style="float: right">
 [mla_gallery category_name="{+request:term_slug+}" posts_per_page=2 mla_output="next_page,last" mla_link_text='&rarr;' mla_rollover_text="Next/last page"]
</div>

I hope that gets you started on composing the clouds and galleries you need. I will leave this topic unresolved until I decide what to do about thumbnail images. In the interim, please update it if you have any problems or further questions about the examples I’ve given. Thanks again for your interest in the plugin.

I am very happy to hear you are making progress; thanks for the good news.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions on the topic.