Dynamic links and filtering

Starting getting some answers by my own already:

[mla_gallery attachment_category=wood-blocks posts_per_page=12 mla_link_href="?p={+post_parent+}"]

[mla_gallery attachment_category=wood-blocks posts_per_page=12 mla_output="paginate_links,prev_next"]

mla_link_href could be done less hackish apparently, but so far so good.

Missed the setting that “Tag Groups” sees the att. Tags taxonomy too, so groups are supported now. Hope MLA would play ball with them!

PS. Just found an issue:
When paginating a gallery residing in a lightbox (featherbox), hitting next page just closes the lightbox window, instead of loading the next page. How to fix this?

Thought hard and experimented with a few approaches I could come up with in linking and re-organizing both taxonomies, but at the end of the day came back to the Tag Groups approach mentioned before as the most straightforward to our needs (interestingly, the ghost taxonomy issue didn’t happen this time). So I would be very thankful for your kind assistance in making this work as described in the previous post, i.e. something like:

[mla_gallery attachment_category='"wood-blocks" {+term_group+}' posts_per_page=16 size=medium mla_link_href="{+product:permalink+}"]

(Of course, if in your in-depth experience in this field you may suggest a different, simpler, or just more elegant WP approach, I’d be very keen to learn more about it.)

Thank you!

Thank you for the effort and time spent on this. It’s really appreciated!

I don’t use Media Category Management anymore. It indeed duplicates MLA.

a) [term_group] creates a flexible link between Att. Category [attachment_category] and Product Category [product_cat] taxonomies, without the need one to mirror or pollute the terms of the other. [term_group] is just another view to the taxonomy trees, which allows one subset to match a different another in the other tree. Practically for us this means:

b) [product_cat] is front-end, more complex, and leaning to the art motives and customer’s interests (angels, fairies, etc.). Also is a work in progress that may change often over time.

c) [attachment_category] is back-end, simpler and leaning to the physically crafted products themselves (prints, woodblocks, cards, etc.). Also the terms used to describe the motives are broader and group a lot more stuff together that seldom changes in the seller’s (ours) point of view.

d) Using [term_group] would allow us to keep that freedom of growing 2 different taxonomies without one polluting the other, and without some rigid or hackish structures (e.g. mirroring the simpler taxonomy (MLA) into the complex (WC) via a separate subtree and hiding it with CSS in the front-end).

e) Extra bonus, [term_group+product_cat] gives us another “related products” feature different than WC’s.

Example:
term_group=”Angels,Asian,Ethnic,Fairies”
attachment_category=”Angels(Angels), Asian(Asian), Ethnic(Ethnic), Fairies(Fairies), Jewelboxes, Prints, Woodblocks”
product_cat=”Angels & Men(Angels), Icon Reproductions(Ethnic), She & Him(Ethnic), Asian Woman(Asian), Asian Collection I(Asian), Exotic Faces(Fairies)”
etc.

f) Note we don’t put the physical crafts (woodblocks, etc.) in the product_cat taxonomy on purpose at this time.

Hope I managed to make a somewhat better case now?

Anyway, I’m aware this is all perhaps a purely academic exercise as [term_group] seems out of the scope of MLA, by the former not being a custom type per se it seems. Thanks anyway for the time you spent trying to understand where I’m coming from with these strange requests 🙂

Hi David, thanks so much for your continuous interest in these issues!

It seems you’re not familiar yet with the Tag Groups plugin, and this has lead to a certain disconnect and confusion in our conversation. My apologies!

To get us both to a common ground, let’s see how to configure and make that plugin work first:

a) After installment, we need to associate the taxonomies we want to group together from here:
wp-admin/options-general.php?page=tag-groups-settings. In our case, those are product_cat and attachment_category.

b) We need to add to the Tag Group *its own terms*. That happens in another GUI located here:
wp-admin/edit.php?page=tag-groups. According to our example, those tag-group-specific terms are, separately: Angels, Asian, Ethnic, Fairies.

c) Now we can group *category terms* belonging to the 2 different chosen taxonomies, in a *one-to-many relationship — per taxonomy*, where the “one” is a single Tag Group term, and the “many” – category term(s) belonging to each taxonomy. That happens from the “Categories” section for the given custom type. For product_cat in wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=product_cat&post_type=product. We go and hit “Quick Edit” for a given term and assign it to a group via the dropdown. For attachment_category, we do the same in wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=attachment_category&post_type=attachment.

With the above all set up, let’s go again through our example.

You have defined a Tag Group named ”Angels,Asian,Ethnic,Fairies”

I have defined 4 different term_group tags.

You have added seven attachment_category terms to the group, “Angels .. Woodblocks

Not exactly. Those are attachment_category terms only. I have *assigned* term_group terms to those, as per described above.

You have added six product_cat terms to the group, “Angels & men … Exotic Faces”

As above, those are product_cat terms. I’ve *assigned* term_group tags to those.

For your application, you want to use a Tag Group to select terms…

For my application, I want to select a single term belonging to attachment_category with a single term belonging to term_group, in an AND association. For example: [mla_gallery attachment_category="woodblocks" term_group="angels"]

Regarding the performance issues, I’m indeed not familiar yet with the WP DB structure, but I still imagine a more or less straightforward ‘select’ could do:

SELECT attachment_category, term_group 
FROM media.table
WHERE attachment_category='woodblocks' AND term_group='angels'

The only subtler trick would be reading term_group from the product the MLA gallery is being instantiated in, but one should be able to get that from ordinary product’s metadata. The “bonus” is we get an MLA gallery filtered by the different scope introduced in the sql relationship of above.

Hope these clarifications are useful enough and would clear up the confusion!

***

Regarding the featherlight lightbox, I haven’t used that plugin mentioned, because I recall there’s an issue with the featherlight version they use in the source. I took it from here: Featherlight JS

and added it in functions.asp:

/**
 *  Alternative lightbox functionality to workaround opening lightbox over quickview
 */
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'ew_enqueue_scripts__featherlight' );
function ew_enqueue_scripts__featherlight() {
    wp_enqueue_style ('featherlight-css', get_stylesheet_directory_uri(). '/assets/featherlight.min.css');
    wp_enqueue_script('featherlight-js',  get_stylesheet_directory_uri(). '/assets/featherlight.min.js', array('jquery'), '1.7.7', true);  
}

in style.css of child-theme (Flatsome) goes this:

/* featherbox lightbox */
/* overrides default styles via data-featherlight-variant */
.ew-feather { background: rgba(256,256,256, 0.8); }
.ew-feather .featherlight-content {
	width: 85%;
    padding: 30px;
	color: #666;
	background: #fbfbfb;
    overflow-y: auto; /* scroll fix from nesting with quickview */ 
}

In the plugin I use for templating (woocommerce-tm-extra-product-options) goes this:

<div class="similar-button"><a class="button white is-white is-small" href="#" target="_self" data-featherlight="#ew-similar-prints" data-featherlight-variant="ew-feather">More Prints <span class="special">❐</span></a></div>

<div id="ew-similar-prints" class="ew-similar">
<h2>Other Similar art as paper prints</h2>
[mla_gallery attachment_category="a3-print" posts_per_page=16 size=medium mla_link_href="{+product:permalink+}"]</div>

Thank you!

I’m sharing my solution to the issues described in this post. Thanks very much to David for his kind assistance, and chat off-site!

1) Basic integration of ‘Tag Groups’ plugin with MLA
The code below reads the term_group term(s) associated with the current product in single-product page and concatenates it with a single attachment_category term, in an AND association.

/*********************************************************************/
/**
 * Manage custom MLA syntax
 * https://wordpress.org/support/topic/group-of-wc-product/
 * https://wordpress.org/support/topic/feeding-mla-with-ids-via-hook-2/
 * Example Usage:
 * [mla_gallery attachment_category="a3-print" my_term_group=true]
 */
add_filter( 'mla_gallery_attributes', 'ew_gallery_attributes', 10, 1 );
function ew_gallery_attributes( $shortcode_attributes ) {
    if ($shortcode_attributes['my_term_group'] && $shortcode_attributes['attachment_category']) {
        // concatenate term1,term2
        $shortcode_attributes['attachment_category'] .= ew_term_group();
        // output all images where term1 AND term2. More complex queries will require of WP_Query syntax 
        $shortcode_attributes['tax_operator'] = "AND";
        // each category must be populated by itself. Children beneath aren't included
        $shortcode_attributes['tax_include_children'] = "false";
        unset( $shortcode_attributes['my_term_group'] );
    } 
	return $shortcode_attributes;
}
/**
 * Add basic term_group support to MLA 
 * https://wordpress.org/support/topic/dynamic-links-and-filtering/
 */
function ew_term_group() {
    global $product;
   
    // get all term_group ID's associated with the current product
    $product_terms = get_the_terms( $product->get_id(), 'product_cat' );
    // get all term_group labels
    $tag_group_labels = get_option( 'tag_group_labels', array() );
    // create an additional filter to feed back to MLA
    foreach( (array)$product_terms as $terms ) {
        if ( isset( $tag_group_labels[ $terms->term_group ] ) ) {
             $mla_filter[] = $tag_group_labels[ $terms->term_group ];
             shuffle( $mla_filter );
        } 
    }
    // return just a randomized first term to keep a simple MLA syntax
    // (otherwise a concatenated AND filter would become too narrow and get us nothing)
    return isset( $mla_filter ) ? ','.$mla_filter[0] : '';
}

2) ‘Featherlight JS’ integration with MLA Pagination
I couldn’t make MLA pagination natively work in a lightbox, but fortunately it happened by itself with the help of the following plugin: Ajax Pagination and Infinite Scroll, by Malinky and the following paging settings in the plugin configuration:

Posts (Content) Selector:   [#ew-similar-prints] or [div.gallery]
Post (Item) Selector:       [figure.gallery-item]
Navigation Selector:        [#ew-pagination-prints]
Next Selector:              [a.next]

Need to wrap MLA pagination in a named div, example:

<div id="ew-similar-prints" class="ew-similar">
<h2>Other Similar art as paper prints</h2>
[mla_gallery attachment_category=prints-a3 my_term_group=true posts_per_page=4 size=medium mla_link_href="{+product:permalink+}"]
<div id="ew-pagination-prints" style="display:none">
[mla_gallery attachment_category=prints-a3 my_term_group=true posts_per_page=4 mla_output="paginate_links,prev_next"]
</div>
</div>

Multiple MLA paginations can be used on the same page (as I do) if the wrapper is distinct.