The Third Man

The short answer is: learning how it’s done. This all started because my website is for a magazine, and I decided that for the content from the actual printed magazine, I decided that I did not want to display the metadata related to the author and the date (the author because we generally don’t use bylines, and the data to make the content less “dated”). As I said, most users won’t even realize that there is different metadata appearing, but I wanted to see if I could figure it out.

I asked many people, none of whom could really help me past the beginning stages, months of playing around myself to see what worked, and I took a 10-hour PHP class on Lynda, at which time it clicked to me that I could just kind of duplicate the twentytwelve meta function with an if and an else in between. Then, when I solved it after all that work, I saw that the categories (and, by extension, the tags) were listing in alphabetical order (I guess that’s sortby => name), when I had actually set them up and ordered them and their respective ids in a particular order (by magazine content, by magazine issue, by magazine department, etc.). So of course I wanted to make things harder for myself.

So, yes, it’s a learning exercise. I think the level of knowledge needed to solve the problem is above my head (I wouldn’t have known exactly where to look for the functions you described above, though I had a pretty good idea), so it will probably have to wait.

Thanks again for your help.

Thank you for your reply. I do have debug set to true, and it has confirmed that when I alter this function incorrectly, it “breaks” the site.

So it looks like the line of code I am trying to alter is:
$categories_list = get_the_category_list(__( ', ', 'twentytwelve' ) );

But if I simply replace with:
$categories_list = wp_list_categories( array('orderby'=> 'ID'));

What I get is a ul of all the categories I have created for the site. Below that the $utility_text reads “This entry was posted in and tagged…” and then goes on to list the tags; i.e. it doesn’t show the categories inside the $utility_text.

I’m sure that, as you suggested, I am missing something simple in terms of syntax is perhaps the way I am typing argument or string but I can’t figure it out.