Get ID of parent category

The problem

Sometimes you need to get the ID of the parent category when you’re browsing a child category page. Don’t you? :)

The solution

Get the ID of the parent category with a few lines of PHP code:

<?php
if( is_category() ) {
  $q_cat = get_query_var('cat');
  $cat = get_category( $q_cat );
  echo $cat->category_parent; // Print the ID
}
?>

Requirements

  • WordPress 1.5.1 and above
Reference: http://forum.wordpress-deutschland.org/design/50877-hauptkategorie-id-auslesen.html

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under WordPress Hacks. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

11 comments

  1. Oliver Schlöbe
    November 13, 2009 at 6:54 pm

    [New Blog Post] Get ID of parent category http://bit.ly/470wHg
    #wp

    Reply
  3. Simon North
    January 17, 2011 at 1:11 pm

    Great little snippet for getting the parent ID in WP http://bit.ly/gFoxsZ

    Reply
  4. erin
    February 22, 2011 at 11:07 pm

    Thank you SO VERY MUCH!!!!

    Reply
  5. Chris
    March 22, 2011 at 11:52 pm

    Been looking for this for a good bit, thanks.

    Reply
  6. Ravi
    April 6, 2011 at 10:00 am

    Thanks You very very much.

    Reply
  7. WordPress: Get ID of top-level parent category – Alex Leonard’s Blog
    April 20, 2011 at 1:41 pm

    [...] category (or any number levels down), I would have the top-level category ID returned to me. This post showing how to get the parent category ID sent me in the right direction and I’ve developed it a bit to fulfil my [...]

    Reply
  9. Katie @ women magazine
    May 13, 2011 at 7:24 am

    Well, sometimes you waste hours searching for something you exactly need and find nothing and sometimes you are bang on target. I was looking getting subcategory ids too so i wrote this under your function

    // get the sub category if we have them
    foreach ($categories as $cat) {
    $parent = $cat->category_parent;
    if ($parent != 0 ){
    $sub_cat_ID = $cat->cat_ID;
    $sub_cat_name = $cat->cat_name;
    $sub_cat_url = get_category_link($sub_cat_ID);
    }
    }

    Now, i have category and subcategory id’s both.

    Reply
  10. Barry Walsh
    June 9, 2011 at 2:14 pm

    Very useful thank you! I also needed to check if the category was a sub category for displaying a different layout. I only have one level of subcategories that I was checking against so I added:

    if($parent_cat != 0){
    echo “This is a subcategory”;
    }
    else{
    echo “This is a top level category”;
    }

    A top level category will return an ID of 0 for it’s parent category’s ID because it obviously doesn’t have one. This won’t be very useful if you have further nested categories but it did the job for me. That being said you can use it to test if you’re on a sub category.

    Reply

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