Parentless Categories

This plugin provides a template tag which acts as a modified version of WordPress’s built-in template tag, the_category(). the_category() lists all categories directly assigned to the specified post. c2c_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, c2c_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 argument to the template tag allows you to define a custom separator, e.g. to have a simple comma-separated list of categories: <?php c2c_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 preceding example):

• <?php c2c_parentless_categories(); ?>

Outputs 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 c2c_parentless_categories( ',' ); ?></ul>

Outputs something like:

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

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Developer Documentation

Developer documentation can be found in DEVELOPER-DOCS.md. That documentation covers the template tags and hooks provided by the plugin.

As an overview, these are the template tags provided by the plugin:

• c2c_parentless_categories() : Outputs the parentless categories.
• c2c_get_parentless_categories_list() : Returns the list of parentless categories.
• c2c_get_parentless_categories() : Returns the list of parentless categories for the specified post.

These are the hooks provided by the plugin:

• c2c_parentless_categories (action), c2c_get_parentless_categories_list, c2c_get_parentless_categories (filters) :
  Allows for an alternative approach to safely invoke each of the identically named functions in such a way that if the plugin were deactivated or deleted, then your calls to the functions won’t cause errors on your site.
• c2c_parentless_categories_list (filter) :
  Customizes the return value of the c2c_parentless_categories_list() function.
• c2c_get_parentless_categories_omit_ancestors (filter) :
  Customizes the function argument indicating if ancestor categories of all directly assigned categories (even if directly assigned themselves) should be omitted from the return list of categories.