October 31st in Wordpress by pbu .

How to get parent category name in Wordpress?

In wordpress, sometimes you may have many subcategories for a different parent categories. By default wordpress lists all sub-categories.

if i have category structure like

Drupal
- 2 Column
- 3 Column
- Left sidebar
- Right sidebar

Wordpress
- Fixed Width
- Widget Ready
- News/Magazine
- Photogallery

and if i do a wordpress post (with title say CSS Gallery) inside Wordpress -> Photogallery i want the title to display

Blog Title > Parent Category Name > Blogpost Title
like
Top Best Themes > Wordpress > CSS Gallery

Here is the wordpress code to display parent category name. Its a very simple code but did the job for me. You can insert inside header.php if you want to change titles in wordpress. This is how it works. First it gets the category name of wordpress post, and from it gets the Category ID of its parent then it gets the parent name with get_cat_name() function. If the parent is empty (which means the wordpress post is already listed in the parent category) then print the current category name.

<?php
$category = get_the_category();
$parent = get_cat_name($category[0]->category_parent);
if (!empty($parent)) {
echo '&raquo; ' . $parent;
} else {
echo '&raquo; ' . $category[0]->cat_name;
}
?>

Note that this code has a limitation and it works best with only one level deep.!

7 Comments

Alfie
March 15, 2009

How about getting the link of the parent category? Thanks.
Reply
Zigzo
May 27, 2009

Thanks for the code snippet — super simple and straight to the point.
Reply
max
May 30, 2009

hi pbu
thanks for the code, i was searching via google and found many ways, but yours the only one that worked.

thanks
Reply
Antonio S
June 10, 2009

I appreciate your hard work in writing these posts. I know how difficult it can be to keep the ideas flowing. Thanks!
Reply
timur senga
June 17, 2009

Your blog is amazing, i first landed to another post but then get interested and thought, i will just look a little more arround to see what else i can find out about such stuff
Reply
Sven
November 9, 2009

Thanks for your code! You should remove the second “empty” after !empty, at it will cause an error

Cheers,
Sven
Reply
kzok
January 12, 2010

I love u man, u code is amazing and perfect ^^, thanks thanks
Reply