Is it possible in WordPress to test for an empty term or category?

Question

I have a project that requires me to list out the available terms for each custom post type and indicate visually which of the terms/categories are empty via css/javascript. Is there a way to return a list of terms/categories and say add a class to the empty ones ? Thanks for any and all assistance.

Answer 1

Yes there is. First you get your terms using get_terms() (I'm assuming your cpt has associated taxonomy with it)

<?php 

$custom_terms = get_terms('my_taxonomy');

if (is_array($custom_terms) && !empty($custom_terms)) {
    # code what you want here...
} else{
    # code if your terms come empty...
}

This should do it.

EDIT

After $custom_terms variable do a print_r($custom_terms); to see what the variable holds. You should get an array filled with stdClass Objects, one for each category in this taxonomy.

So you can further do something like this:

foreach ($custom_terms as $term) {
    if ($term->count != 0) {
        print_r($term->name);
    }
}

This will show you names of non empty categories in your taxonomy.