Getting Category Children

Question

i have a problem understanding the get_terms function

All i want is getting all the children of specific category so that it can be listed. But i don't really know how the $args works.

So with this get_terms(category, $args);

I tried to use the child_of

$args = array(
        'child_of'          => 0,
        'childless'         => false,
);

But it gives all the category while i only need the child of a category. Changing the value to "1" gives empty result.

Then i tried the 'slug'

$args = array(
        'slug'              => 'on-going',
        'child_of'          => 0,
        'childless'         => false,
); `

This gives nothing but "On-going" only.

This is the category tree in my wordpress

The only thing i want is listing all child category of "On-going", that's it....

Thanks

Answer 1

The child_of parameter excepts an integer value of the specific term you need to get descendants from. This means that you need to get the ID from the On-going category term and then passing that ID to the child_of parameter.

To note, the child_of parameter returns all descendants of the term passed, this includes direct children and all children of those children etc. If you only need first level children of a specific term, then you need to pass the term id to the parameter parent.

If you do not have the exact id, you can use get_term_by to get the id and then pass that to child_of in get_terms

EXAMPLE

This example shows how to get the term ID if you only have the term name, like in your case On-going

$get_term_id = get_term_by( 'name', 'On-going', 'category' );
$terms = get_terms( 'category', array( 'child_of' => $get_term_id->term_id ) );
var_dump( $terms );