Good to hear from you again, and thanks for the question.
You have only posted part of your page content but I can give you a possible solution based on my guess of the other elements on the page. It looks like you have two dropdown controls, one for an attachment_tag and one for an attachment_category. You want the user to select a term from both of these to display items that are assigned to both the selected tag and the selected category. Is that right?
If so, you can use the technique outlined in the “MLA Term List Examples” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab. Just add a content template that supplies a default value when no dropdown value is present. For your application, this would be something like:
[mla_gallery]
orderby=date
order=asc
posts_per_page=10
post_mime_type=application/pdf
post_parent=all
add_filters_to=pp
tax_relation=AND
attachment_tag="{+template:({+request:a_tag+}|no-term-selected)+}"
attachment_category="{+template:({+request:a_category+}|no-term-selected)+}"
link=file
mla_target="_blank"
mla_caption="Title:{+title+} Author: {+caption+} {+description+}"
columns=1
mla_nolink_text="Select from dropdown.. Please note that prior to 1967 not every year has 12 issues - "
mla_markup="psarchives"
my_gallery_title="Archives Articles for {+request:a_category+} {+request:a_tag+}"
[/mla_gallery]
Note that I am using the alternate “enclosing shortcode” syntax to break the parameters over several lines for readability. Since you are using a custom markup template you might also consider moving some of your parameters to the “Arguments” section of the template. That might simplify maintenance if the template is used in multiple places with the same parameter values.
I hope the above suggestion meets your needs. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding the solution or if I did not understand your goal. Thanks for your continued interest in the plugin.
