Wordpress Sliding Doors – take 2 [PHP]

June 24th, 2008 by Daniel | Posted in PHP | 1 Comment

I have had a lot of feedback over one of my first ever posts, Wordpress: Sliding Doors details how you can convert wp_list_categories into a subtle HTML markup so that we can use the sliding doors principle. However the method I described in my original post no longer works. After a lot of thinking and head scratching I have discovered a new, if not better, way to achieve the same results.

By correctly formatting the wp_list_categories output, we can explode the output into an array of the categories. We can then split each string and add our HTML code in before and after the category name.

<ul class="menu">
    <li <?php if(is_home()) echo 'class="selected"'; ?>><a href="/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
    <?php
        // get all the categories
        $cats = explode('<br />', wp_list_categories('echo=0&show_count=0&title_li=&style=none&exclude=1'));
        // remove the last value
        array_pop($cats);
        foreach ($cats as $cat)
        {
            // what it comes through as
            // <a href="http://dtsn.co.uk/category/uncategorized/" title="View all posts filed under Uncategorized">Uncategorized</a><li>
            // get the position of the first >
            $beforeName = strpos($cat, '>')+1;
            $afterName = strpos($cat, '</a>');
            $length = $afterName - $beforeName;
            $name = substr($cat, $beforeName, $length);

            if ($beforeName > 0) {
                $class ='';
                // are we on this page?
                if (is_category($name)) {
                    $class=' class="selected"';
                }

                // add the opening span tag behind the opening anchor tag
                echo '<li' . $class . '>' . substr($cat, 0, $beforeName) . '<span>' . $name . '</span></a></li>';
            }
        }
    ?>
</ul>