Question

I’m new to wordpress and have a quick question about showing a post’s category names. I have two main categories

Games

• free cell
• solitaire

• classic games

  — pong

  — ms. pacman

Featured Games

etcetera. So that I can make a post and tag what game it is from (note that there are three tiers here). If my post was a screen grab of ms. pacman, i would choose the Games > Classic Games > Ms. Pacman category. I might also want this awesome image in my home page featured slider, so I might choose Featured Games as well.

However!!! When I get to the post detail page, i just want to spit out CATEGORY: Ms. Pacman. I don’t want Games / Classic Games or Featured Games.

So now, I have

<?php the_category(', ', 'single');?>

To show only the child element, but it is still showing all three levels as well as the Featured categories. I think I need to exclude that “featured category” id from the query but don’t know how. Here’s my specific code:

<?php if ( have_posts() ):?>
  <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();?>
    <div class="category">CATEGORY: <?php the_category(', ', 'single');?></div>
  <?php endwhile;?>    
<?php endif;?>

I don’t know how to do custom queries or what to change or where to change it. Is this possible?

Answer 1

It seems there aren’t any filters that will easily produce what you’re looking for, but it should be possible to put something together using the source code of get_the_category_list which you can find here: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.3.2/wp-includes/category-template.php#L0

Like this, change the markup as you please:

$categories = get_the_category( false );
foreach( $categories as $category ) {
    echo '<a href="' . get_category_link( $category->term_id ) . '">' . $category->name . '</a>';
}