[Resolved] Template tags for parent/child category separated

[Tom]

Anything now?: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/template-tags-for-parent-child-category-separated/#post-1305635

[William]

Unfortunately not I’m afraid

[Tom]

Custom stuff like this can take some fiddling.

Anything now?: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/template-tags-for-parent-child-category-separated/#post-1305635

[William]

For that code, this now appears:

array(0) { }

[Tom]

Hmm, so no categories exist with that parent.

I tried child_of instead: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/template-tags-for-parent-child-category-separated/#post-1305635

Anything?

[William]

Hi there, the child category is ‘The Stranger’ with the parent category being ‘Albert Camus’ on this page:

https://bookanalysis.com/albert-camus/the-stranger/analysis/

Would you like access to the site, to help debug this quicker?

[Tom]

We have a policy where we don’t actually make changes to customer sites – the chance of errors is too high, unfortunately.

Did my latest code output anything on the page?

[William]

Sure thing – I tried your lastest suggestion and still not luck

[Tom]

Ok, one more try: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/template-tags-for-parent-child-category-separated/#post-1305635

If that doesn’t work I’ll whip up a local install and work through it 🙂

[William]

That has caused a load of gobbledygoop to appear here:

https://bookanalysis.com/albert-camus/the-stranger/analysis/

[Tom]

That’s good! You can remove the var_dump() line to remove the mess.

The list that shows up under it are all categories that are children to the current category – does that look right?

[William]

I’ve removed that line and now a bullet point list appears for all the categories:

https://bookanalysis.com/albert-camus/the-stranger/analysis/

For the above page, the child category is ‘The Stranger’ that should appear

[Tom]

Yes, right now it’s displaying all the categories that are an ancestor (child or distant child) of the current category you’re viewing.

It looks like The Stranger is last one the list there. I’m not sure how you would specify which category to display if there are multiples like this. You could target the first one or last one quite easily, but I’m not sure if it’s that simple in your case.

[William]

‘Albert Camus’ is the parent category and the only child category to it is ‘The Stranger’ so I’m not sure why others are displaying?

[Tom]

WordPress itself should handle this quite well, but it depends on the value we’re getting as the current category. If the current post we’re viewing has more than one category, it’s going to grab the first category it can and then find children for it.

For complex relationships like this, you may want to look into something like Pods (https://pods.io/) or Advanced Custom Fields.

Otherwise, you’re starting to look at a quite complex custom solution using PHP.

[Author]

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