How to Grab the Absolute Parent of Any Child Page

Are you looking for a way to get absolute parent of any child page? While there’s probably a plugin for this, we have created a quick code snippet that you can use to get absolute parent of any child page in WordPress.

Grab the absolute parent of any child page, no matter how ‘deep’ the child page is in the navigation tree. This is great for navigation more than two levels deep.

In this example below, when the user is on any child page of “Our Company” (which has an ID of 2), it’ll assigned a class to the list element:

<ul class="nav"> <!-- Main nav -->
    <li<?php if(is_tree("2")) echo ' class="active"'; ?>><a href="<?php bloginfo( 'url' ); ?>/our-company" title="Our Company">Our Company</a></li>
</ul>

Instructions:

All you have to do is add this code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin:

function is_tree($pid) {      // $pid = The ID of the page we're looking for pages underneath
	global $post;         // load details about this page

	if ( is_page($pid) )
               return true;   // we're at the page or at a sub page

	$anc = get_post_ancestors( $post->ID );
	foreach ( $anc as $ancestor ) {
		if( is_page() && $ancestor == $pid ) {
			return true;
		}
	}
        return false;  // we aren't at the page, and the page is not an ancestor
}

Note: If this is your first time adding code snippets in WordPress, then please refer to our guide on how to properly copy / paste code snippets in WordPress, so you don’t accidentally break your site.

If you liked this code snippet, please consider checking out our other articles on the site like: 23 best WordPress themes for non-profits and how to track affiliate links in Google Analytics.