Get the ID of the direct parent page

Question

I've seen plenty of tutorials on how to get the ID of the upper-most parent, but I can't seem to find anything on how to get the ID from the direct parent.

Eg;

- Big John
  - Little John
    - Baby John

How, if I'm on the Baby John page, can I get the ID of Little John and not of Big John?

Answer 1

I'm assuming that you're asking how to do it with code? (Doing it in backend is pretty easy - just try to edit parent page and see the ID in URL).

So how to check post parent in code? It's also very easy - direct parent is stored in post_parent property. If post has no parent, it will be 0.

So all you have to do is:

global $post;
$direct_parent = $post->post_parent;

Answer 2

$post->post_parent ?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/$post