How to display content from post_parent

Question

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I am a beginner coder, but I've tried a lot of things already:

I'm trying to print the_content from the post_parent of an image. Here's what I'm using right now. I am able to post the title, but not the content (all I can succeed in printing content-wise is the image's content (which is actually the image's 'description' which is not what I'm looking for.

<?php echo wp_get_attachment_image( $post->ID, 'post-image' ); ?>

<h4 class="attach-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h4>

<p>
    <a
        href="<?php echo get_permalink( $post->post_parent ); ?>"
        title="<?php esc_attr( printf( __( 'Return to %s', APP_TD ), get_the_title( $post->post_parent ) ) ); ?>"
        rel="gallery">
        <?php
            printf(
                '<span class="meta-nav">' . __( '&larr; Return to %s', APP_TD ) . '</span>',
                get_the_title( $post->post_parent )
            );
        ?>
    </a>
</p>

<p>
    <a
        href="<?php echo get_permalink( $post->post_parent ); ?>"
        the_content="<?php esc_attr( printf( __( 'Return to %s', APP_TD ), get_the_content( $post->post_parent ) ) ); ?>"
        rel="gallery">
        <?php
            printf(
                '<span class="meta-nav">' . __( '&larr; Return to %s', APP_TD ) . '</span>',
                get_the_content( $post->post_parent )
            );
        ?>
    </a>
</p>

The first 2 pieces of code work correctly, but the last paragraph is where I want to pull the content. But this code just prints the description of the image itself rather than the post_parent's content.

Answer 1

As stated by the other answer, you can not pass an ID to get_the_content() function. You could fetch the post using get_post(), but there's also another handy function that you can use to fetch the content:

The get_post_field( $field, $post_id, $context ) function is what you're looking for:

$content = apply_filters( 'the_content', get_post_field( 'post_content', $post->ID ) );

The the_content filter also makes sure that some features like shortcodes or auto-paragraphs will work as intended.

Simply replace your second <a>...</a> with this:

<?php echo apply_filters( 'the_content', get_post_field( 'post_content', $post->post_parent ) ); ?>

Answer 2

get_the_content() is a function to be used in the loop and doesn't take a post id as parameter: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_content

You could try get_post() to get the parent post object and then access it's content.