Custom Queries - Child Categories not showing up

Question

What I'm Doing

I have a cities category and normal categories. Right now I have them filtering by category, then when the user clicks a city it will filter by category AND city

query_posts(array( 'category__and' => array($city, $category))

The Problem

That works - no problem. The problem comes when I add sub-categories to my main $categories and the admin does not check the parent.

Example

I have a main category: Food and 2 sub-categories Fries & Burgers. I also have a city category called New York. The admin adds a post and checks Fries and New York so by default wordpress will pull up this post. When the user tries to filter it by city (New York) it says there's no posts because the parent was never checked.

---

How do I Bring that sub-category post to the top when the user filters the parent category by city?

I apologize if it is confusing so ask questions if needed. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

category__and is exclusive, so it will not work for your application, if you use tax_query and setup your query as follows, it should work:

$args = array(
    'tax_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category',
            'field'    => 'id',
            'terms'    => $city,
            //'include_children' is true by default
        ),
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'category', //may need to be categories, I don't recall, tweak it till it works.
            'field'    => 'id',
            'terms'    => $category,
            //'include_children', again, is true by default
        )
    )
);
$posts = query_posts( $args );

If that doesn't sit well with query_posts() (I don't see any reason it wouldn't), WP_Query won't complain, so just use that. Also, that link to WP_Query has all the docs you'll need to modify that query, so thumb through there, you'll probably at least want 'post_status' => 'publish'...maybe some more.