category

Thanks for the kind words and this question. MLA uses the WordPress WP_Query class for its queries, and the category support in WP_Query is a bit tricky. You can find a complete explanation in the “Category Parameters” section of the Codex documentation:

Class Reference/WP Query

For your example, the relevant parameter would be:

• category_name (string) – use category slug (NOT name).

So your shortcode would be:

[mla_gallery category_name='derek' columns=2 orderby=name mla_caption="{+description+}" order=ASC posts_per_page=12 post_mime_type=application/pdf link=file post_parent=all]

Note that I have fixed the order=ASC parameter and removed the slash from the end of the shortcode. Give that a try and let me know of you have any problems or further questions. Thanks for your interest in MLA.

Thanks for the positive feedback.

Your post says “If only I could use the list in a drop down.” Do you mean that you want to compose a “gallery” containing a dropdown list of PDF Document titles, where selecting an item from the list will open the document?

If that’s what you want, I believe you can implement it by creating a custom markup template with the appropriate HTML to build a form with a select element and an option list. I can be more specific if you give me more details on what you want.

When you say “The one I found“, are you referring to another plugin? If so, can you tell me which one?

Let me know if I can do more to help you. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Thanks for clarifying your application. I had a look at the plugin you mentioned, WP Publication Archive by Eric Mann. I think we can work out an alternative solution with MLA.

First, you want to organize your documents by Year and Month of publication, regardless of when they are uploaded to WordPress. You can do this in a variety of ways, using category, tag or custom field values. For example, you could define custom fields “Published Year”, e.g., “2013” and “Published Month”, e.g., “201301”/”01″ and so forth. You might be able to automatically populate these fields from metadata in the documents, but manually assigning values wouldn’t be too difficult. If you can post a link to one or more of your documents I can look at them and see what’s possible.

Second, you want a compact way to display the document list on a page and let the user choose one for download/display. A dropdown list is one approach, and I could put together an example for you. The dropdown list would not link to the document directly, but would take you to another page that processed the selection and served up the document. The hard part of this approach is that second step. Here is an earlier support topic that outlines a solution:

Shortcode: Force File Download

If this is the solution you want to pursue, let me know and I’ll put something together.

I would also like to propose an alternative to the dropdown approach. The Collapse-O-Matic plugin can be used with MLA to give you a page with a clickable one line display for each publication year. When you click on a given year, it expands into a list of the twelve monthly documents for that year. Clicking on one of the monthly documents would display the PDF.

I think this alternative is somewhat simpler than the dropdown and would look good on the site. You would have to add an [mla_gallery] shortcode to the page once each year, or you could write some PHP code to do it automatically.

Let me know what you think. If you choose an approach and give me a link to one or more documents I’ll see what I can do.