How do I retrieve the category ID (ugly permalinks) in my sub-navigation menu?

Question

I have recently faced multiple issues with a theme developed with in mind pretty permalinks when moving back to ugly ones (for a number of different reasons). Had issues that I resolved with categories and tags as displayed on my sidebar and also now have the same issue with categories in a custom navigation menu.

Originally, the below code would take me to all the posts whose category is called ‘Amazing’, currently with the use of ugly permalinks (to which I need to stick now for a bunch of reasons) I am returned with a 404 error message. Here is an excerpt of my navigation:

<nav class="my-nav-menu">
  <div class="myclass">
    <ul role="navigation" class="mymenuentries">
      <li class="col-clas">
         <a class="myotherclass" href="<?php echo home_url() ?>/category/Amazing">AmazingCategory</a>
      </li>
   </ul>
  </div>
</nav>

The code will generate this URL:

http://localhost/mywebsite/Amazing

that returns a 404 message, whereas I know that the following will return all the posts associated to that category:

http://localhost/mywebsite/?cat=12

How can I dynamically make sure that the category is fetched by its ID? I am also very much not aware how that piece of code was actually working with pretty permalinks. Can you help?

Thank you

Answer 1

Use get_term_link with the slug, and specify the taxonomy:

$cat_slug = 'Amazing';
$taxonomy = 'category';
$cat_link = get_term_link( $cat_slug, $taxonomy );

if ( is_wp_error( $cat_link ) ) {
   echo $cat_link->get_error_message();
} else {
    echo $cat_link;
}