Get posts in a subcategory of a chosen parent

Question

Taking on legacy data I have the following structure

-Top level category (category)

-- Sub category (report)

--- Post

I want to get all posts in a particular top level category.

The problem is all the posts are only assigned to Sub Categories, not their top level categories.

I've tried the following:

function getPostsInCategory($category) {

    return get_pages(array(
        'post_status'   => 'publish',
        'post_type'     => 'post',
        'child_of'      => $category, // e.g '3'
        'numberposts'   => -1
    ));
}

I use get_pages instead of get_posts because it seems to support heirachy better.

How can I get all posts that are in a "report" that is a child of my chosen category?

Answer 1

You should use get_posts or (even better) custom WP_Query to query posts.

You can use get_pages to do this, but get_pages can't use category (or other taxonomies - just check it in WP sources) to filter results.

So your function should look like this:

function getPostsInCategory($category) {

    return get_posts(array(
        'post_status'   => 'publish',
        'category'      => $category, // e.g '3'  catgory is passed as 'cat' param of WP_Query, so it will display posts from children categories as well
        'posts_per_page'   => -1
    ));
}