i did some research..
there is no official way to get the current category ID. I looked up codex-wiki and tried all present cat-functions. none of them all offered a working option for this. if you not using permalinks, there would be a way by asking for the URL, prefixed by “is_category() {..”
`$cat_id = addslashes(trim($PHP_GET[‘cat’]));
but then again, it’s a nasty hack…
in the codex-wiki they say that the function “the_category_ID()” has been replaced by “get_the_category()”, but what i get of their snippet is only false positives (mixed parent/child cats) .. no idea .. the results of that function are not even close.
i also played around with that function on my own.
no idea what it’s doing. this is really weird..
why theres no way to get that cat_id??
i actually thought out some crazy way to manage this, but not under 5-10 lines of code.. cant be ..
— suggestion for devs —
extend the “child_of” option to be defaulted to current category if is_category.
— end of suggestion —
my 2 bytes.
I would also like to find an answer to this – actually a bit surprised its so hard – seems like a pretty common need.
Yes, pretty common…
<?php
$cat_object = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
$parentcat = ($cat_object->category_parent) ? $cat_object->category_parent : $cat;
wp_list_cats("child_of=$parentcat");
?>
Note that “there is no official way to get the current category ID” from above is incorrect. $cat is a global WordPress var that holds the current category ID (it’s what we set $parentcat to when the current category is not the child to another). No need to trip it out from $_GET.
so does that mean WP should be able to do it without extra code?
Considering I gave the extra code to do it…I think you can consider the answer to be “no.”
(Assuming your question relates specifically to the ‘child_of’ issue, and not the category ID one that Mentor brought up.)
thanks for the code Kafkaesqui, it worked for me perfectly. heres the link http://www.no1guide.co.nz/
ah – sorry I thought it might need to go in the functions.php or something as I haven’t come across code like that yet.
works quite well!
@kafkaesqui
your code above work fine but in home page it show no category , but i dont want to show that
“i dont want to show that“
What *do* you want to show?
it worked well, but now when you have top category <dogs> & select to see all the dog posts, the sidebar now reads:
<brown dogs>
<black dogs>
<golden dogs>
if you then click on <black dogs> the proper post shows up but now the sub cats area reads “no categories”.
What I’d love is a way of having the category label and navigation stay in the sidebar reading as:
<DOGS>
<brown dogs>
<black dogs>
<golden dogs>
not sure if that can be done or not.
any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
Hi, I think this question may be related to this so I’m posting here. I want to figure out how to signify the current category when I’m using wp_list_cats. For example, I want the to be able to style the current category differently, like make it a different color. I have a feeling that I cannot do this using the ‘list’ parameter, but that I may need to create a custom loop that checks if the category is the current one, that way I could echo out something like: li class=”current”
How can I do this?
WordPress should already be setting the current category listed under wp_list_cats() to the class “current-cat”
