Nope, nevermind! I just realized there weren’t any tags applied to the posts. Silly me. lol

@diondesigns thank you! This worked perfectly!

Now I think I need to find a way to sort them by number of occurrences. But now I need to understand why yours works!

Thank you!

I don’t know if this helps or not, but after further tinkering, it looks like my array is actually an array with multiple arrays inside it. Could this be what’s causing the duplication? Can these arrays be pulled out into the root array?

Hmm it seems like the variable $cat is no longer recognized after that.

I get the following errors:
Trying to get property ‘cat_ID’ of non-object … line 114
Trying to get property ‘cat_name’ of non-object … line 114

That line is the echo:
echo '<li><a class="tag" href="'.get_category_link($cat->cat_ID).'">' . $cat->cat_name . '</a></li>';

would it be better to do a custom post type or custom taxonomy here?

thanks @bcworkz,

Unfortunately that didn’t help. My theme is built from the ground up. Does this help? I’ll include the function that includes the custom taxonomy. In this case the i_am is the taxonomy name.

function add_iam_taxonomies() {
	// Add new taxonomy, make it hierarchical (like categories)
	$labels = array(
		'name'              => _x( 'I Ams', 'taxonomy general name', 'textdomain' ),
		'singular_name'     => _x( 'I Am', 'taxonomy singular name', 'textdomain' ),
		'search_items'      => __( 'Search I Ams', 'textdomain' ),
		'all_items'         => __( 'All I Ams', 'textdomain' ),
		'parent_item'       => __( 'Parent I Am', 'textdomain' ),
		'parent_item_colon' => __( 'Parent I Am:', 'textdomain' ),
		'edit_item'         => __( 'Edit I Am', 'textdomain' ),
		'update_item'       => __( 'Update I Am', 'textdomain' ),
		'add_new_item'      => __( 'Add New I Am', 'textdomain' ),
		'new_item_name'     => __( 'New I Am Name', 'textdomain' ),
		'menu_name'         => __( 'Immigration I Ams', 'textdomain' ),
	);
  

	$args = array(
		'hierarchical'      => true,
		'labels'            => $labels,
		'show_ui'           => true,
		'show_admin_column' => true,
		'query_var'         => true,
		'rewrite'           => array( 'slug' => 'i-am' ),
		'show_in_rest'      => true, // need to show this in order for option to display under the 'Document' panel in a post
	);

	register_taxonomy( 'i_am', array( 'post', 'i_am' ), $args );
}

Okay, here’s where I’m at with this as of now. I’m unsure how to get the duplicate results to be filtered out. Which is the top priority. If I can get this to also sort by count, that would be a bonus.

Live Sample

As you can see from the above link, I’m successfully pulling in all the relevant categories and tags of the current search and they are coming in in the chronological order of the posts.

Here’s the page code:

<div class="widget rel-categories">
  <h4>Popular Categories</h4>
  <div class="side-content">
    <ul>
      <?php list_search_cats(); ?>
    </ul>
  </div>
</div>
<div class="widget rel-tags">
  <h4>Popular Tags</h4>
  <div class="side-content">
    <ul>
      <?php list_search_tags(); ?>
    </ul>
  </div>
</div>

My functions.php file:

// Find all search result categories
function list_search_cats() {
  // Start the Loop
  while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
  
    $categories = get_the_category();
  
    foreach($categories as $category) :
      echo '<li><a class="tag" href="'.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).'">' . $category->cat_name . '</a></li>';
    endforeach;
  
  endwhile;
  
}

// Find all search result tags
function list_search_tags() {
  // Start the Loop
  while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
  
    $tags = get_the_tags();
  
    foreach($tags as $tag) :
      echo '<li><a class="tag" href="'.get_tag_link($tag->term_id).'">' . $tag->name . '</a></li>';
    endforeach;
  
  endwhile;
  
}