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WPBeginner» Blog» Themes» How to Display Only Child Category in your WordPress Post Loop

How to Display Only Child Category in your WordPress Post Loop

Last updated on June 22nd, 2012 by Editorial Staff
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How to Display Only Child Category in your WordPress Post Loop

In our previous post, we shared how you can only display parent category in your WordPress Post Loop. This article is the continuation of the similar technique except here we will try to only show child category in your WordPress loop. Unfortunately the_category() does not have any optional parameters like child=0 or depth=-1. When creating our WordPress Gallery, this was one of the issues we had to deal with to organize our single site pages the way we wanted.

To display only Child Category in the post loop (mostly single.php), all you have to do is replace the following code:

<?php the_category(', '); ?>

with this code:

<?php
foreach((get_the_category()) as $childcat) {
if (cat_is_ancestor_of(10, $childcat)) {
echo '<a href="'.get_category_link($childcat->cat_ID).'">';
 echo $childcat->cat_name . '</a>';
}}
?>

Remember to change the number 10 to your parent category’s ID.

In our gallery’s case, we had the parent category called Theme Framework, and bunch of child categories. Each post was only going to be assigned one child category for the framework (for example Genesis). So this code worked out perfectly. See the live example by clicking the image below:

Display Only Parent Category in Your WordPress Loop

Hope this trick solves your problem as well.

Reference:

WordPress Codex

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10 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Mike says:
    Apr 1, 2015 at 6:59 am

    Managed it!

    foreach((get_the_category()) as $childcat) {
    $parentcat = $childcat->category_parent;
    if (cat_is_ancestor_of(10, $childcat)) {
    echo get_cat_name($parentcat);
    }
    }

    Reply
  2. MIke says:
    Apr 1, 2015 at 6:50 am

    I have three main categories and this code is successfully working in my single page loop to echo the actual selected category name.
    I now want to echo the parent of the category. The complication is that I have two layers below the main category (3 levels) and I want to echo the one level parent not the top level parent. It seems easy to echo the top parent, but I haven’t seem any code to return the child level category of a grandchild category?

    Reply
  3. amnachohan says:
    May 5, 2014 at 1:48 pm

    Will it work outside the loop ?

    Reply
  4. Marian Rick says:
    Feb 26, 2013 at 4:10 pm

    This is a great piece of code. Thanks a lot so far!

    For one of my projects I have to go further, and display only the lowest subcategory. So there may be three levels, (Forms -> Squares -> Big Squares). With this code all subs (Squares -> Big Squares) are displayed. How can I tell this code to repeat the process till only the last child is found and displayed?

    If you’ve got any solutions for that you are my heroes once again! Keep up your great work and blog!

    Reply
  5. GoranJakovljevic says:
    Oct 29, 2011 at 5:10 pm

    is it possible to do this for 2 categories instead of single one?

    Reply
  6. gashface says:
    Sep 15, 2011 at 4:27 am

    How Would I include &orderby=ID ?

    Reply
  7. Andus Beckus says:
    Feb 15, 2011 at 10:38 am

    This is great thanks!

    But how do you display children of all categories and not just cat 10?

    Be great if someone could help with this. :)

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Feb 15, 2011 at 2:35 pm

      If you are trying to display a list of all child categories, then use wp_list_categories() function. It has parameters that allow you to list only child categories or only parent categories. But that doesn’t work for the case that we are talking about in this article.

      Reply
      • Mattia says:
        Aug 1, 2013 at 5:05 am

        great, but if I want to show not “category 10” but “current category”?

        Reply
  8. Keith Davis says:
    Feb 4, 2011 at 2:29 pm

    Great snippets of info from you guys.
    I really have to start to get into this PHP.

    Great site boys and I notice that you are up to Pagerank 6!
    How about a couple of posts on upping your pagerank.

    Reply

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