Matthew Vaccaro

Get WP Utmost Parent

I needed to highlight part of a large navigation menu, even when you are inside a sibling or child page of a parent page. So, we needed to find the top level ‘grandparent’ or ‘utmost parent’ of a page. In comes this little guy:

Add this to your functions.php file:

// Get grandparent page closest to the top
function get_top_ancestor($id){
$currentPage = get_post($id);
if(!$currentPage->post_parent){
return $currentPage->ID;
} else {
return get_top_ancestor($currentPage->post_parent);
}
}

Put this in your page:

$currPageID = get_the_ID();
$currPageActive = get_top_ancestor($currPageID);

Simple and useful!