More, more, more links in Expression Engine

1st November 2006

The split between intro and body is pretty common across blogs and news sites. On the home or news page you show the introductions to a number of articles or news stories, then you link to the full piece on it’s own page. If this is the intro, I’ll see you in the body.

Expression Engine gives us plenty of ways to accomplish this type of functionality. At the most basic level, we just need to setup custom fields for body and more then use something like the following: -

{if body}
<a href=”{title_permalink=“group/single_entry”}”>Read More</a>
{/if}

In simple terms, this chunk of code says: -

1. If there’s any content in the body field
2. Show a link to the single-entry page for this article
3. That’s it

That’s a pretty basic and obvious example that works for most situations. But earlier today I needed to do something slightly more complex. My client wants to either use the body field to show the full news story on a subsequent page or fill in a link field in order for the Read More to link off-site.

Simple, I thought. I’ll just add a link_url field, then make a quick tweak to the example above: -


{if body}
<a href=”{title_permalink=“group/single_entry”}”>Read More</a>
{/if}

{if link}
<a href=”{link_url}”>Read More</a>
{/if}


Works fine, until the client enters both an external link in the link_url and some copy into the body field. We just know this will happen, and the result will be two clumsy links.

So, the more sophisticated version. It turned out to be slighly more complex than I first imagined, but easy to tackle with Expression Engine’s conditionals and operators. Here’s the logic: -

• If the body field has content and the link field is empty, link to the single-entry page
• If the body field is empty and the link field has content, link to the external url
• If both fields have content, link to the single-entry page, and put the external url at the end of the article
• If neither field has content, don’t do anything

Achieving this in EE is simple if we use elseif and re-arrange the logic a little. Here’s the code: -


{if body !=”” AND link !=”“}
<a href=”{title_permalink=“group/single_entry”}”>Read More</a>

{if:elseif body != “”}
<a href=”{title_permalink=“group/single_entry”}”>Read More</a>

{if:elseif link !=”“}
<a href=”{link_url}”>Read More</a>

{/if}


I think that’s quite neat and tidy: -

• If the body field isn’t empty (has content) and the link field isn’t empty (has content), link to the single-entry page (and we’ll add the link at the end of the article
• If that isn’t the situation, but the body field isn’t empty (has content), link to the single-entry page
• If neither of the previous are the situation, and the link field isn’t empty (has content), link to the external url

Sure, it’s simple, but it shows how you can use Expression Engine to ensure your content works in a smart a way as possible.

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