So here, I have the above screenshot which lists all the categories in my WordPress environment. I listed.
1)Parent category
- Animals
Children categories of Animals
- Bears
- Gibbons
- Orangutan
- Rhinos
- Tigers
2)Parent Category
Children categories of Campaigns
- Asian Rhino Project
- Australian Orangutan Project
- Free the Bears
- Silvery Gibbon Project
In my php file, I have the following code that makes up the display structure of my checkboxes.
<form action="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" id="filterForm" method="post">
<?php
$parent_categories = get_categories($parent_args);
foreach($parent_categories as $parent_category){
//create main headings for other categories other than Uncategorized.
if($parent_category->name!="Uncategorized"){
$category_label = "Filter By ";
echo '<h3 style="font-size: 20px; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);text-shadow: 2px 3px 0px rgb(0, 0, 0);">'.$category_label.''.$parent_category->name.'</h3>';
//fetch the parent category's id
$firstchild_args['parent'] = $parent_category->term_id;
$firstchild_categories = get_categories($firstchild_args);
//fetch all the first level children categories
foreach($firstchild_categories as $firstchild_category){
$output = "";
$output = $output."<label class="checkbox">";
$output = $output." <input type="checkbox" value=".$firstchild_category->cat_ID." onclick="processForm()"><span style='font-size: 17px; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);text-shadow: 2px 3px 0px rgb(0, 0, 0);'>".$firstchild_category->name;
$output = $output."</label>";
echo $output;
}
}
}
?>
<input type="hidden" name="submitted" id="submitted" value="true">
</form>
While this is fine for displaying my categories, but when trying to implement some server-side functions when user toggles multiple checkbox clicks, I’m struggling to figure out which are the correct hooks/filters I should use to do this effectively.
Filter posts by multiple checkbox categories – wordpress
But after reading and experimenting for a while, I found his approach is not quite I was looking for. My thinking is that when a user checks one of the category checkboxes, the onclick event will trigger the form submission and WordPress will begin to process $_POST arguments right away then I will use WP_Query object to retrieved the passed-in arguments to process so that my lists of news posts will get filtered by its category checked checkboxes accordinly…
But I couldn’t achieve what I needed after following the above link!
What should I do next?
