Do you want to show the current taxonomy title, title, URL, and more on your taxonomy archive pages in WordPress?
You may need this when creating custom templates for your taxonomy archives. This includes categories, tags, and any other custom taxonomies you may be using.
In this article, we will show you how to easily display the current taxonomy title, URL, and more in WordPress.
Creating Taxonomy Archive Templates in WordPress Themes
If you are learning WordPress theme development or making your own custom WordPress theme, then you may want to create custom templates for taxonomy pages like categories, tags, or any custom taxonomies you have on your site.
The good news is that WordPress comes with a powerful templating engine. This allows you to easily create custom templates in your theme for different parts of your WordPress website.
For instance, you can simply create a category.php template in your theme, and WordPress will then use it to display your category archive pages.
Similarly, you can create a template for any custom taxonomy by naming it in the taxonomy-{taxonomy}-{term}.php format. For more details, see our complete WordPress template hierarchy cheat sheet for beginners.
Once you have created a taxonomy template file, you can copy and paste your theme’s archive.php template code as a starting point.
But that would be very generic. You might want to make it more specific for taxonomy pages.
For instance, you may want to display the taxonomy title in different places or add a link to the taxonomy RSS feed. You could also display the taxonomy description, show the number of articles, and more.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to fetch the taxonomy-related data in WordPress and display it in your WordPress theme.
Showing Taxonomy Title, URL, and More in WordPress
To display all your taxonomy-related data, you need to dynamically find out which taxonomy page is displayed and then get all the required data for that particular taxonomy term.
First, you need to copy and paste the following code into your taxonomy template:
<?php $term = get_queried_object(); ?>
This gets the information of the current taxonomy based on the page you are on.
For example, if you were on a category page called ‘business’, then it will get the information for that taxonomy term.
After that line of code, you can display the title of the taxonomy and other info like this:
echo $term->name; // will show the name
echo $term->taxonomy; // will show the taxonomy
echo $term->slug; // will show taxonomy slug
You can do the same using any of the following values:
- term_id
- name
- slug
- term_group
- term_taxonomy_id
- taxonomy
- description
- parent
- count
- filter
- meta
Let’s take a look at a real example. In our test child theme, we wanted to display the term title, taxonomy name, number of articles, and the term description.
We used the following code to display this data:
<?php $term = get_queried_object(); ?>
<h1 class="category-title"><?php echo $term->name; ?><span class="taxonomy-label"><?php echo $term->taxonomy; ?> (<?php echo $term->count; ?> articles)</span></h1>
<p class="category-description"><?php echo $term->description; ?></p>
You can see we added some CSS classes so we could add custom CSS to style the text, too.
Here is how it looked on our test site:
We hope this article helped you learn how to show the current taxonomy title, URL, and more in WordPress themes. You may also want to see our cheat sheet for WordPress theme developers or our expert pick of WordPress page builder plugins for no-code solutions.
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Pete says
This works well too…
$queried_object = get_queried_object();
$this_tax = get_taxonomy( $queried_object->taxonomy );
echo $this_tax->labels->singular_name; //change this accordingly
WPBeginner Support says
Thank you for sharing this code as another option
Admin
Keyur says
Many thanks for this code – this helped me to resolve my problem for last one week. I was trying it myself but didn’t managed but using your code, I got it.
Thanks once again.
Aleksandar says
Thanks very much, i needed this for custom taxonomy in breadcrumbs.
sami says
What if we want to get Taxonomy -> Terms name/title outside the loop with wp Query on Page template? Plus how to get Taxonomy name/title with the same scenario.
Thanks
Kalle Pedersen says
Noob question here: where is the “archive page” in which I need to paste the above code? Have tried it in different pages, but to no avail
Abel says
archive.php file
sylee says
Thank you so much!
Nechemya K says
Hi.
I trying to build a website for movies.
I have a few post types like movies, tv, and more
And I have a few taxonomies like: directors. Stars. Year. And more.
How can I make taxonomy pages to show only the movies post type title in the page?
Because when I ask to show all post in this tax, all of the post from all types shown
Thanks for you help.
Editorial Staff says
The answer is here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Type_Parameters
Admin
Aaron says
The title and first paragraph promises directions on how to get the URL, yet I see no mention of how to do so in the article body.
Editorial Staff says
The second snippet of code shows just how to do that.
Admin
Pete says
I just use this inside the loop
Pete says
<?php single_tag_title(); ?>
Pete says
and this for the term/tag description
<?php $description = get_queried_object()->description; ?>
<?php echo $description; ?>
Pete says
This forum post might be useful too…
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-display-custom-taxonomy-tags-outside-the-loop
P.s. can wpbeginner please not have “Subscribe to WPBeginner Updates (Weekly Email)” ticked as default every time I post a comment, it’s very annoying, and a little unethical… thanks.
Saad says
You Made My Day I was looking for this for so long thank you guys very much :). it will really help me in building a new theme for my blog .
Frank Pereiro says
This is really, really nice.
I wish there was more post on taxonomies like this one.
Thank you very much for sharing
Editorial Staff says
We can definitely work on that
Admin