How to get the parent category of the current category?

  • On child category pages I need to get the parent of the current category. I tried:

    <?php if (is_category( )) {

$thiscat = get_category( get_query_var( 'cat' ) );
$catid = $thiscat->cat_ID;
$parent = $catid->category_parent;

if (!empty ($parent) ) {
echo $parent;
}
else {
echo '<span>this is a parent category</span>';
}
} ?>

    but I think category_parent only works with posts, not categories.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • You’re trying to get category_parent from the wrong variable; you’ll want to get it from $thiscat instead:

    $thiscat = get_category( get_query_var( 'cat' ) );
$parent = $catid->category_parent;

    At this point, $parent contains the ID of the parent category (or 0 if the category has no parent), and then you can call get_the_category_by_ID() to get the category name.

    Thread Starter jrcollins

    (@jrcollins)

    Hey thanks! I was wondering what I was doing wrong.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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