1. Home
  2. Knowledge Base
  3. WooCommerce Protected Categories
  4. Developer Documentation

How to check if a category is protected using PHP

WooCommerce Protected Categories provides a class you can use in your own code to check a category's visibility - for example, is the category private or password protected? The class is Barn2\Plugin\WC_Protected_Categories\Category_Visibility.

To use this class, you create a new instance specifying the category ID (the term ID):

$my_category = new \Barn2\Plugin\WC_Protected_Categories\Category_Visibility( 34 );

Then, use one of the methods provided to check whether it is public, protected, or private:

if ( $my_category->is_public() ) {
     // category is public
}

if ( $my_category->is_protected() ) {
    // category is protected - this could be password, role or user protected
}

if ( $my_category->is_password_protected() ) {
    // category is password protected
}

if ( $my_category->is_user_protected() ) {
    // category is user protected
}

if ( $my_category->is_role_protected() ) {
    // category is role protected
}

if ( $my_category->is_private() ) {
    // category is private
}

Each of these methods also accepts an optional $check_ancestors flag (defaults to false). If you set this to true, the function will check any ancestors of the current category as well:

if ( $my_category->is_password_protected( true ) ) {
   // this category or one of its ancestors is password protected
}

To check whether a protected category has been unlocked by any method (password, current user, etc), you can use the is_unlocked() function:

if ( $my_category->is_unlocked() ) { 
    // category is unlocked for the current user
}

To view the full API for this class, and the rest of the plugin, please refer to the plugin API documentation.

Related Articles

Still need help?
If searching the knowledge base hasn't answered your question, please contact support.
Get Support