In this article, I will take a look at getting and displaying a custom post type’s categories, category name, link, and list of all the categories of the custom post types.
But before moving further, let say I have a custom post type called Events which has slug ‘events’ and it has a taxonomy called Categories which has slug ‘events-cat’ as shown in the image below.
We will use this case, for all the examples further in this article.
Get Category of a Custom Post Type
To get categories of a custom post type and display them along with their respective posts, I will use the the_terms() function inside the loop.
the_terms() function display all the associated categories of a custom post type. It requires two parameters, post_id and taxonomy slug.
In the below code, $post->ID will automatically get the id of current post type and 'events-cat' is my taxonomy slug.
You can also add a prefix to the list of categories and separators between the categories by passing the value to their parameters. You can find the parameter reference here.
<?php // display assigned categories of a custom post type the_terms($post->ID, 'events-cat'); ?>
Get Category Name & Link of a Custom Post Type
To get the category data like category name, URL of a custom post type, I will use get_the_terms() function inside the loop.
Again get_the_terms() function also required Post ID and taxonomy slug. This will return the custom post type’s category data as an array.
Now I will filter out the category data from this array by using foreach loop, and display my custom post type’s category name using $term->name, and category link using get_term_link($term) function. As shown in the code below.
<?php
// displaying the category name of custom post type inside the loop
$terms = get_the_terms($post->ID, 'events-cat');
foreach ($terms as $term) {
echo '<li><a href="'.get_term_link($term).'">'.$term->name.'</a></li>';
}
?>
Get Custom Post Type Categories List
To get the list of all categories of my custom post type Events, I will use the get_terms() function by giving my custom post type’s taxonomy slug, which is 'events-cat' in my case.
You can also pass multiple taxonomies as an array to the taxonomy parameter.
Another important thing is, 'hide_empty' parameter, make sure it set to false. Otherwise it will not fetch the categories which has 0 post.
Don’t forget to replace the taxonomy slug with your custom post type taxonomy.
<?php
//Display a list of all the categories of custom post types
$terms = get_terms(
array(
'taxonomy' => 'events-cat', // Custom Post Type Taxonomy Slug
'hide_empty' => false,
'order' => 'asc'
)
);
echo '<h2>List of all categories of custom post types</h2>';
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($terms as $term) {
echo '<li><a href="'.get_term_link($term).'">'.$term->name.'</a></li>';
}
echo '</ul>';
?>
