art of simplicity/blog/

I’ve been doing a little more WordPress (v2.9.2) hacking as a new project required a little more CMS-like control over a website than WordPress by default provides.

As a result I’ve resorted to extending WordPress and the results have been pretty encouraging already. I have to say, for the record, that the WordPress team has made extending the WordPress platform a breeze through custom plug-ins and hooks.

OK. Enough WordPress appreciation and on to the reason for the post.

I recently needed a quick and easy way to get the slug for a post parent.

The site I’m working on has a series of sub/mini-sites under the root directory, meaning that there will be multiple homepages for each of the sub-sites and each sub-site will have it’s own navigation options.

As a result, I needed a quick way of determining which sub-site a ‘home’ slug returned for the current page belonged to. Now, the way I had structured the pages in WordPress was by creating a separate ‘home’ page for each sub-site as a page of the root site so the URL’s would be:

[root directory] http://artofsimplicity.co.uk/
[sub-site 1] http://artofsimplicity.co.uk/sub-site-1/home/
[sub-site 2] http://artofsimplicity.co.uk/sub-site-2/home/

The way I went about doing this was to retrieve the slug for the parent page, which would either return ‘sub-site-1′ or ‘sub-site-2′.

Achieving this was quite straightforward with the following snippet of PHP code:

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<?php
 
	// retrieve the page slug.
	function get_post_slug($post_parent = false){
		global $post; // WordPress global $post
 
		if($post_parent){
 
			$parent = get_post($post_parent, OBJECT); // get the post data.
 
			$slug = $parent->post_name; // get the post_name/slug
 
		}else{
			$slug = $post->post_name; // if not a post_parent the post_name/slug for the current page will already be accessible.
		};
 
		return $slug;
	};
 
	// same function as above but wrapped up in a new function for convenience.
	function get_post_parent_slug(){
		global $post; // WordPress global $post
 
		return get_post_slug($post->post_parent); // once the current post data is loaded you can retrieve the post_parent ID to retrieve that posts post_name/slug.
	};
?>

Maybe this simple little snippet will help those trying to achieve a similar effect in WordPress.

At the time of writing WordPress 3.0 has just been released so we’ll see if it’s no longer needed in new version.