Output Results by the first letter of title

    I've been looking through the Docs and Forums for a while now but can't figure out a solution for this.


    I have this page of a website on a CMS that is closing down (Adobe Business Catalyst) http://tuffyworld.com.au/songlist I'm trying to replicate this page in perch, but I can't figure out the best way to output the items.


    HTML: Songlist item template
    1. <div class="songTitle">
    2.     <perch:content id="songName" type="smarttext" label="Song Title" title>
    3.     <perch:if exists="songArtist">
    4.     <div class="artistYes"><em>By</em> (<perch:content id="songArtist" type="smarttext" label="Artist">)</div>
    5. </perch:if>
    6. </div>


    PHP: Perch Content Custom
    1. <?php perch_content_custom('Song List', array(
    2.     'filter' => substr($title, 0,1),
    3.     'sort' => 'songName',
    4.     'match' => 'contains',
    5.     'value' => '2',
    6. )); ?>


    I can't even get this to output only the first item with a '2' in the name all items are showing.


    Sorry if this is a stupid question, I'm new to perch, LOVING IT, just my PHP knowledge is fairly basic (I've got 2 live website working great on perch with more to come)


    Can you please give me some direction with this issue.


    Thanks in advance

  • drewm

    Approved the thread.

    Hi


    I believe your filter value needs to be equal to a Perch field ID. You could try using `'match' => 'regex',` and use a PCRE expression that mirrors your requirement as the value e.g. `^2` – NB I am not good at REGEX so this might not be right for you!

    Thanks ellimondo


    I'll look into it, my PHP knowledge is pretty limited I might just make a select field for my customer to select a letter the song starts with and then just have a heap of filters to pull each letters result. I'd like to make it more automatic, but what you wrote above has gone straight over my head

    You can group items without filtering from within the template.


    Output the list in the order you need:


    PHP
    1. perch_content_custom('Song List', array(
    2. 'sort' => 'songName',
    3. 'sort-order' => 'ASC',
    4. ));



    You can use conditional tags plus the format attribute inside the template to achieve what you want.


    The following outputs the first character of a field:


    HTML
    1. <perch:content id="songName" format="C:1">



    The following checks the previous item against the current item:

    HTML
    1. <perch:if different="songName" format="C:1" format-both>
    2. The first character of the previous item's songName is different than the current item's
    3. </perch:if>



    If you want the rendered HTML to be:




    You can use something like this: