coffee2code

Like the_category(), list categories assigned to a post, but excluding assigned categories that have a child category also assigned to the post.

This plugin provides a template tag which acts a modified version of WordPress’s built-in template tag, the_category(). the_category() lists all categories directly assigned to the specified post. parentless_categories() lists those categories, except for categories that are parents to other assigned categories.

For example, assume your category structure is hierarchical and looks like this:

Vegetables
|– Leafy
| |– Broccoli
| |– Bok Choy
| |– Celery
|– Fruiting
| |– Bell Pepper
| |– Cucumber
| |– Pumpkin
|– Podded
| |– Chickpea
| |– Lentil
| |– Soybean

If you directly assigned the categories “Fruiting”, “Cucumber”, and “Pumpkin” to a post, parentless_categories() would return a list that consists of: “Cucumber”, and “Pumpkin”. Notice that since “Fruiting” was a parent to a directly assigned category, it is not included in the list.

By default, categories are listed as an HTML list. The first argment to the template tag allows you to define a custom separator, e.g. to have a simple comma-separated list of categories: <?php parentless_categories(','); ?>.

As with categories listed via the_category(), categories that are listed are presented as links to the respective category’s archive page.

Example usage (based on preceeding example):

<?php parentless_categories(); ?>
Displays something like:

<ul><li><a href="http://yourblog.com/category/fruiting/cucumber">Cucumber</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://yourblog.com/category/fruiting/pumpkin">Pumpkin</a></li></ul>

<?php parentless_categories(','); ?></ul>
Displays something like:
<a href="http://yourblog.com/category/fruiting/cucumber">Cucumber</a>, <a href="http://yourblog.com/category/fruiting/pumpkin">Pumpkin</a>

Read the readme.txt.

1. Unzip parentless-categories-v1.0.zip inside the /wp-content/plugins/ directory for your site
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
3. (optional) Add filters for ‘parentless_categories’ to filter parentless category listing
4. Use the template tag <?php parentless_categories(); ?> somewhere inside “the loop”