October 31st in Wordpress by .

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.!

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19 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
  • moezzig
    March 17, 2010

    First i got error with your code but after editing small thing, it’s work… thank you… so much… love it.

    Reply
  • Steve
    April 6, 2010

    Thanks, just what I needed!

    Reply
  • gerry
    April 23, 2010

    Great site, great info…keep it coming

    Reply
  • Caroline Bryant
    May 20, 2010

    RSS Feeds are really very helpful and you could get site and news updates from it.-;~

    Reply
  • Ashok
    June 2, 2010

    Hi pbu,

    That helped me, thank you very much

    Reply
  • Erin Turner
    July 28, 2010

    RSS feeds are really great because you are always updated with the latest news or blog posts.*:;

    Reply
  • Encryption Softwares :
    October 25, 2010

    RSS feeds are necessary for transmitting your blog updates to your readers or followers“”

    Reply
  • Granite Tiles ·
    November 10, 2010

    wordpress is simply the best blogging platfrom that you can use, it has lots of features ,.-

    Reply
  • donya
    December 10, 2010

    If anyone is looking for code to get parent categories but also have the link, check out this site: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/creating-the-parent-category-as-a-link-when-using-the_category

    Code at the very bottom worked perfect for me.

    Reply
  • fanny
    July 16, 2011

    thank you so much. you can’t imagine how long it took me to find a code like this. I just changed it a tiny bit to eliminate the >> and add the link to the parent category. THANK YOU. x

    Reply
  • marky6
    October 10, 2011

    can somebody help me where to find my source code in wordpress? how to i edit to put some adsense and to customize more.. i found it hard.

    anybody help me?

    Reply
  • Héctor Omar
    October 13, 2011

    Thank you!

    Reply

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