Retrieving password protected categories

The following information is aimed at developers. If you don't know how to use it then we recommend asking your developer or posting a job on Codeable to get a quote from an experienced developer.

Need professional assistance?

We've partnered with Codeable to provide our customers with expert help if required.

Get a Quote

If you are retrieving the category-tree with a custom WP REST API endpoint then you can add a parameter to retrieve password protected categories.

You can do this by adding the 'meta_key' and optionally adding the 'meta_value' parameters. For example, to retrieve all password protected categories, you could use:

$password_protected_cats = get_categories( [
'meta_key' => 'password'
] );

You can also achieve the same result by using using 'meta_value' together with 'meta_key'. So to select all password protected categories:

$private_cats = get_categories( [
'meta_key' => 'visibility',
'meta_value' => 'protected'
] );

The following example would select all private categories rather than password protected categories:

$private_cats = get_categories( [
'meta_key' => 'visibility',
'meta_value' => 'private'
] );