Dani Llewellyn

I’ve released a minor update that should allow you to hide the “empty” letters. Version 1.9.1 includes two classes on the letters, one for when there are associated posts, and the other for when there aren’t:

has-posts and no-posts. You should now be able to use the following CSS snippet to hide the empty ones:

.az-letters ul.az-links li.no-posts {
    display: none;
}

Any characters that are not included in the alphabet used for categorisation will be added to the group entitled with #. Or, at least, that is how it is supposed to work. If it doesn’t then I will look further into why, but as far as I can see it works as designed.

I have checked your site and there are no posts beginning with a symbol in your A-Z page. Are you stating that there are posts which are being omitted when they begin with a symbol and thus aren’t visible in that listing? Can you confirm that you definitely have posts beginning with a symbol that isn’t in the alphabet used for sorting and categorisation?

The default alphabet, unless overridden by translations from glotpress or by yourself, is:

AÁÀÄÂaáàäâ,Bb,Cc,Dd,EÉÈËÊeéèëê,Ff,Gg,Hh,IÍÌÏÎiíìïî,Jj,Kk,Ll,Mm,Nn,OÓÒÖÔoóòöô,Pp,Qq,Rr,Ssß,Tt,UÚÙÜÛuúùüû,Vv,Ww,Xx,Yy,Zz

You have added into this alphabet, via usage of the shortcode numbers="before" attribute, the numerals 0 thru 9 at the beginning of the alphabet grouped into a single group. The symbols group will always be last and will be omitted entirely if there are no titles beginning with a symbol in the listing.

It doesn’t look like you have the A-Z listing output on that page at all? It looks like WordPress is displaying that URL as an archive listing, not a single page or post. You likely want to customize your archive-a-o.php template to add an A-Z Listing onto that URL.

WordPress has issues with pages using the same URL as in-built archive listings, so I expect difficulties if you try to override the default mechanisms. It will require some PHP coding but even then it is likely to end with strange behaviour. The simplest fix to use a post-type archive URL is to edit the archive’s template in your theme to change the output from the archive query to an A-Z Listing call.

The first problem sounds like a bug that will need a new release. If you’re comfortable with theme building and the WP_Query mechanism you can work-around it by calling the listing directly instead of using the shortcode, but that does require quite a bit of knowledge in how WordPress queries are constructed to format the correct taxonomy query.

Back to top links can be removed in two ways:

1. copy the template from

   wp-content/plugins/a-z-listing/templates/a-z-listing.php
   

   into your theme’s folder and editing it to remove the line

   <div class="back-to-top"><a href="#letters">Back to top</a></div>
   

   or

2. use a custom css addition, such as via the theme customizer’s custom css feature, which includes the rule:

   #az-slider div.letter-section div.back-to-top { display: none; }
   

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Dani Llewellyn.

You’re right, the multi-column is broken. I’ve worked-up a fix for it which will land in version 1.9.0. If you’ve already copied the template into your theme you will want to check with the new version to either merge with your copy if you’ve made customisations or overwrite the copy in your theme if you haven’t.

I’m adding a back-to-top feature in the upcoming 1.9.0 which will change the templates in the plugin. If you’ve modified the template or copied it into your theme then either:

• check the changes when the release lands to merge with your copy,
• replace with the newer template, or
• remove the template from your theme to revert to the stock one from the plugin.

Hi,

The following short code should work, I think:

[a-z-listing post-type="post" taxonomy="category" terms="obituary"]

post-type defaults to page so you need to override it to post so that the plugin prints blog posts. I see that the readme.txt doesn’t explicitly state this in the example for filtering by category, so that needs fixing; note-to-self :-).

Hi,

You can achieve this with a bit of custom code to support your use. You will need to add something similar to the following into your theme of child-theme’s functions.php (I hope I’ve written it correctly, but do test it first if you can, because I’m not certain it’s perfect):

function ignore_articles_in_az_index( $indices, $item ) {
    // all the articles we want to strip
    $articles = array( 'a', 'an', 'the' );

    // save the title for quicker access
    $title = $item->post_title;

    foreach( $article in $articles ) {
        // get the length of the 'article'
        $len =  mb_strlen( $article );

        //check whether this 'article' starts the title (+1 added to length to 
        //include space to ensure we don't match partial words like 'another'
        //would match 'an', but won't match 'an ')
        if ( mb_substr( $title, 0, $len + 1, 'UTF-8' ) === $article . ' ' ) {
            //get the true first letter to index by after the 'article'
            $index = mb_substr( $title, $len, $len + 1 );
            //return the new index - this is needlessly complex, I'll fix it one day
            return array(
                $index => array( array(
                    'title' => $title,
                    'item' => $item,
                ) ),
            );
        }
    }

    //if we get here then we didn't change the index letter so we return the
    //unmodified original to not break anything
    return $indices;
}

//hook the correct plugin-provided filter
add_filter( 'a_z_listing_item_indices', 'ignore_articles_in_az_index', 10, 2 );

References:
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/add_filter/
https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-strlen.php
https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.mb-substr.php
https://a-z-listing.com/reference/hooks/a_z_listing_item_indices/