Displaying the Next and Previous Entry in a Category with Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on November 16, 2010 10:55 AM | 18 Comments | No TrackBacks |
Using the MTEntryNext and MTEntryPrevious tags it is very easy to display information about the previous or next entry in Movable Type, but only if you are interested in a purely chronological ordering.  But what if you want to limit the entries on display to those of a particular category?
There appear to be two solutions that you can find on-line, and neither of them work:

Fortunately, this problem can be solved with some template code (which you can put in an Entry archive or in any entry context:

<mt:entrycategory setvar="thisentrycategory">
<mt:entryid setvar="thisentryid">

<mt:entries category="$thisentrycategory" sort_order="ascend">
<mt:setvarblock name="links" index="$__counter__"><mt:entrypermalink></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:if tag="entryid" eq="$thisentryid"><mt:var name="__counter__" setvar="thiscounter"></mt:if>
</mt:entries> 

<mt:var name="thiscounter" op="-" value="1" setvar="previouscounter">
<mt:var name="links[$previouscounter]" setvar="previouslink">

<mt:var name="thiscounter" op="+" value="1" setvar="nextcounter">
<mt:var name="links[$nextcounter]" setvar="nextlink">

<mt:if name="previouslink">Previous entry: <mt:var name="previouslink"></mt:if><br>
<mt:if name="nextlink">Next entry: <mt:var name="nextlink"></mt:if>


How does it work:
  • First, the ID and main category of the current entry are stored in variables.
  • The entries loop goes over all entries in the aforementioned main category, in chronological order, and stores their URLs in a numbered array. (Note: you can store other info too, if you need it)
  • When we get to the entry we are trying to look up the next and previous entries for, we store its position in the array using the $thiscounter variable.
  • After the array has been constructed, we take the elements in it that come just before and just after the position we stored, and store their values in two new variables, $nextlink and $previouslink.   Note that if our entry was first or last in the array, the next or previous element will come up empty (which is what we want, in fact).
  • Finally, we display the values of the $previouslink and $nextlink variables (if they are not empty)


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18 Comments

michael webster | November 22, 2010 3:10 AM | Reply

Martin, I used this code in the About this Page widget in MT 5.02, and has you can see:

http://www.franchise-info.ca/supply_chain/2010/09/how-%20to-reduce--pci-compliance-costs.html

it didn't quite work.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

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