Drupal: List child taxonomy terms of current parent term

2008-04-18 04:16

Task

On a recent project a client asked for the following: when visiting a taxonomy term, if that term has children, to display a new block displaying the children terms. The block would also need to have the parent term as the title.

Step 1: Function

Inside your template.php file add the following:

<?php
function themename_child_terms($vid = 1) {
  if(arg(0) == 'taxonomy' && arg(1) == 'term') {   
    $children = taxonomy_get_children(arg(2), $vid);
      if(!$children) {
        $custom_parent = taxonomy_get_parents(arg(2));
          $parent_tree = array();
          foreach ($custom_parent as $custom_child => $key) {
            $parent_tree = taxonomy_get_tree($vid, $key->tid);
          }
          $children = $parent_tree;
      }
  
    $output = '<ul>';
    foreach ($children as $term) {
      $output .= '<li>';
      $output .= l($term->name, 'taxonomy/term/' . $term->tid);
      $output .= '</li>';
    }
    $output .= '</ul>';
   
    return $output;
  }
}
?>

Step 2: New Block

Create a new block and add the following to the block body. (Be sure to select the input as PHP):

<?php // $vid is the vocabulary id.
    print themename_child_terms($vid = 1);
?>

Step 3: Alter Block Title

Create a block-block-blockid.tpl.php file inside the default theme directory. Put the following inside the new file:

<div id="block-<?php print $block->module .'-'. $block->delta; ?>" class="block block-<?php print $block->module ?>">
<?php // let's get the parent term title for the child term we are visiting
$parent_title = array_reverse(taxonomy_get_parents_all(arg(2)));
if($parent_title) {
$block->subject = $parent_title{0}->name;
}
?>
<?php if ($block->subject): ?><h2><?php print $block->subject ?></h2><?php endif;?>
<div class="content">
<?php print $block->content; ?>
</div>
</div>

Tip

The function could be added to the block body (block edit form) instead of the theme's template.php file. Calling the function inside the template.php file will create an extra step of security, preventing the admin/client from breaking the block (accidentally altering/removing the function) when editing.

snippets
Drupal

Comments

Guest23974 (not verified) - Thu, 2009-02-05 10:14

Hi Elvis, I need to design a custom frontpage that will do the same thing that you have explained in this post. Any ideas or tips? Thanks

Martijn (not verified) - Sat, 2009-02-28 09:50

Hi Elvis, do you also have a D6 solution for this please?

ermannob (not verified) - Mon, 2009-07-06 10:01

@Martijn: that code actually works on Drupal 6.

Martijn (not verified) - Mon, 2009-07-06 11:59

Hi,

I only get to see the childterm with a bullet in front of it.

So when taxonomy/term/1902, for my site is aliased to:

/india, then I only see the subterms like:

-

.Kerela

-

Greetings, Martijn

Conrad (not verified) - Mon, 2009-10-12 04:20

Thanks so much for this code; dropped in, worked perfectly. Great work!

Guest9687 (not verified) - Tue, 2009-11-10 03:39

I don't know why this does not work in my Drupal 6.14 website.

elvis - Tue, 2009-11-10 13:45

In Drupal 6, you have to empty cache and theme registry when making changes to template.php. You can do this from:
admin/settings/performance

If that doesn't work, check watchdog and any PHP errors to get an idea of what is going on.

Barbarian (not verified) - Thu, 2009-12-24 16:37

Great snippet! Is there anyway this could be modified to return a list of terms separated by +, for use in views arguments? (very usefull if one is using composite or panels nodes).

jamesbisset (not verified) - Wed, 2010-01-06 21:41

Thanks for this. Fits my needs almost perfectly.

But how do I get the block to continue to display when I'm showing one of the nodes belonging to the children? At the moment, the block just disappears if I'm not on a taxonomy page.

I'm assuming I'll need to pass the $nid to the function from somewhere and work out the $vid from there, but the first step is to work out why the block doesn't appear on a node page.

elvis - Mon, 2010-01-11 02:44

Hi James, if you look at the first part of the code, it checks to see if the current page is /taxonomy/term/xx, or arg(0)/arg(1)/arg(2)

If arg(0) != 'taxonomy', then nothing happens. Try this.

Milo (not verified) - Thu, 2010-01-07 06:06

I was very happy to find this code snippet but it is returning the term description instead of child terms (running drupal 6.15).

I changed "themename" to my theme's name (mytheme) and added the code to my template.php.

Then, I added the print mytheme_child_terms($vid = 5); code to the page header on a views taxonomy page. (The vocabulary id is 5)

When I visit a views taxonomy page, it breaks the formatting and simply returns the term's "description" as html.

What I am doing wrong? How can I add this function to a view?

elvis - Mon, 2010-01-11 02:29

Hi Milo, I have not tried this on D6 yet. But, I am sure there is a module available for this functionality. When I made this there was nothing available for D5.

If you don't mind, report back if you find a D6 solution. If not, i will test the snippet on D6 and find the issue.

Cheers

albert (not verified) - Thu, 2010-01-28 18:13

Hello. Sorry for my poor english. I am quite new to Drupal. I would like to ask, if is it safe to use $term->name and similar variables. Is there some htmlspecialchars PHP function applied on these variables? I have created a taxonomy term which contained html tags. After printing out this term with the function l($term->name, $url), the html tag was embedded into the html code. So I think this is not very safe... especially when visitors can tag nodes.

Yohog (not verified) - Thu, 2010-02-04 12:02

I tested the code on my yohog site, but the block is not displaying, there's no error either. Btw i'm using D6 and adaptive theme. I think I will go for CCK to do this.

Yohog (not verified) - Thu, 2010-02-04 12:27

Oh i just found a module that work for D6, here it is http://drupal.org/project/taxonomyblocks

Guest25253 (not verified) - Wed, 2010-02-10 05:11

$output .= l($term->name, taxonomy_term_path($term));

validoll (not verified) - Wed, 2010-02-10 05:13

$output .= l($term->name, 'taxonomy/term/' . $term->tid);

Replase to

$output .= l($term->name, taxonomy_term_path($term);

Guest17984 (not verified) - Sun, 2010-10-03 11:23

This was super great! But alas, the child terms won't translate to other languages. Any ideas?

3goose (not verified) - Sat, 2011-01-15 13:05

It seems that no matter what site I build, I always want taxonomy to behave this way. In Drupal 7 (and possibly 6?) I was able to do this easily for the term pages by using the default views replacement of the term pages and changing the argument: Taxonomy: Term ID (with depth) The depth is set to 0 by default. Just change it to a higher number and the child terms will show on parent term pages. I assume that 1 will only show children, 2 will show children and "grandchildren", etc. Does anyone know if there is a performance hit for choosing larger numbers? Why shouldn't I just choose 10 in case my hierarchy becomes more complex in the future?

Alex (not verified) - Wed, 2011-03-09 08:52

Thanks for this one ! but how to add taxonomy image attached to term ? By advance, thank you best regards

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