Grayden MacLennan's blog

Possible Bug in MT

I've been beating my head against this for a while today. I have two main categories in a blog, one called Announcements and one called Events. Each of these two categories has several subcategories and some of THEM have subcategories too.

I wanted to produce an SSI file that contains a navbar, but due to some unrelated markup restictions I had to run two loops in MT to produce the proper output for each of the two sections. I did a pair of the following blocks to produce the appropriate subnavs:

<ul class="subnav">
	<MTTopLevelCategories>
		<MTIfIsDescendant parent="Announcements">
			<MTIfNonZero tag="MTCategoryCount">
				<li>><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="<$MTCategoryDescription$>"><MTCategoryLabel></a>
				<MTElse>
					<li>><MTCategoryLabel>
				</MTElse>
			</MTIfNonZero>
			</li>
		</MTIfIsDescendant>
		<MTSubCatsRecurse max_depth="3">
	</MTTopLevelCategories>
</ul>

The only difference between the two blocks is the parameter parent in <MTIfIsDescendant>.

For some reason, the Events block was producing the proper output with no problem whatsoever, but the block for the Announcements section was not producing anything. I ran a gazillion diagnostics and triple checked my spelling everywhere, but this set of tags would NOT acknowledge the presence of subcategories whose parent is Announcements. I renamed the category to foo and suddenly it worked! This is all very bizarre because all the other tags I've used in other pages that reference Announcements work fine. I couldn't keep the category named foo, and Announcements apparently doesn't work, so I tried News. THAT didn't work either! D'oh! I tried name tweaking again by adding a "t" to make it Newts and suddenly it WORKED again.

WTF is going on here? Are these reserved words somehow? Why would foo and Newts work but Announcements and News wouldn't? Why does the problem only crop up when this set of MT Tags is used? Is the coding behind the <MTIfIsDescendant> flawed?