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Question

I have a site with 5 different categories, each of them with a notices section. I would like also to have another section to see the latest notices from any category.

So far, I figured out that I can just use this in the URL ?cat=20,25,30,35 and it will return exactly what I want (if I'm not mistaken).

Now, I would like to know how could I create another template page for that particular section containing all the notices.

Usually I do something like this in my category.php:

if($this_category->slug == "groups-london" || $this_category->slug == "groups-cambridge"){
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/groups.php');
}else{
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/general.php');
}

BUt in this case I can not use the same approach because I noticed the $this_category only contains the information from the category passed as the first parameter in the URL. So, in this case ?cat=20,25,30,35 only from category with ID 20.

Any recommendation? Maybe I should just use a completely different approach to solve this issue?

Answer 1

You need get_categories() with an include argument:

if (isset($_GET['cat'])) {
  $this_category = get_categories(
    array(
      'include' => $_GET['cat']
    )
  );
  var_dump($this_category);
}

You will get an array of stdClass objects containing category data. There are several ways to parse that but this might do:

if (isset($_GET['cat'])) {
  $this_category = get_categories(
    array(
      'include' => $_GET['cat']
    )
  );
  //   var_dump($this_category);
  $cats = wp_list_pluck($this_category,'slug');
  var_dump($cats);
  $needle = array('groups-london','groups-cambridge');
  var_dump(array_intersect($needle,$cats));
  if(array_intersect($needle,$cats)){
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/groups.php');
  }else{
    include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/general.php');
  }
}