Dynamically generate category id and store in variable

Question

I was able to get this working just fine with this code with advanced custom fields:

<?php $value = get_field('extended_store_descriptions', stores_47);
echo $value;
?>

Now how can I make that number 47 dynamic and automatically generate based on the category id.

I tried doing this

<?php $storenum = get_the_category(); ?>
<?php $value = get_field('extended_store_descriptions', stores_$storenum);
echo $value;
?>

To no avail, I'm sure this is any easy fix if someone can jump in. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

What is stores_47 exactly? A variable name? Shouldn't it be $stores_47 instead?

I don't understand what you want to do here, but I think you're looking for variable variables.

Try this:

<?php
$cat_id = 47;
$value = get_field('extended_store_descriptions', ${ 'stores_' . $cat_id } );
echo $value;

Answer 2

I'm not 100% sure what you want to achieve, but hope this helps (works for me):

<?php $cat_id = get_query_var('cat'); ?>
<?php echo $cat_id; ?>

I am using this in the category.php page, so it's kind of a general code. if you have a specific category, then you might need to get category ID by slug:

<?php $category_id = get_cat_ID( 'Category Name' ); ?>

Answer 3

Thanks so much for the help, especially to rrikesh.

I figured it out with some help from this page: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/trying-to-output-a-posts-terms-taxonomy-as-text-not-urls#post-1188801

<?php
// Get terms for post
$terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID , 'stores' );

// Loop over each item since it's an array
foreach( $terms as $term ) {
// Print the term_id method from $term which is an OBJECT
// $lovers will be grabs the current store page id
$lovers= $term->term_id;
// Get rid of the other data stored in the object, since it's not needed
unset($term);
}
?>

<?php
$cat_id = $lovers;
$value = get_field('extended_store_descriptions', 'stores_' . $cat_id );
echo $value;

?>

Thanks so much for the input, let me know if there's a more elegant way to write the code above, but it will work for now.