Get Name of Parent Menu Item in Joomla

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Sean Redmond

How to get the name of the current page’s parent from the menu (i.e., get the title of the page one level up) in Joomla 1.5:

$menu = JSite::getMenu();
$parent = $menu->getItem($menu->getActive()->parent)->name;

$menu->getActive()->parent returns the id of the parent, which is why you then have to pass that id to $menu->getItem([id])->name. It would be nice to have a parent() function so that you would only need $menu->getActive()->parent()->name, but I quibble.

Photo: University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections, via Flickr Commons

8 thoughts on “Get Name of Parent Menu Item in Joomla”

Roman on April 21, 2011 at 5:10 pm said:

Thanks. It is just what I was looking for.

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- Sean Redmond on April 21, 2011 at 5:21 pm said:
  
  Roman,
  
  Glad you found it helpful.
  
  Reply ↓
Rich Wyatt on July 1, 2011 at 4:46 pm said:

Thanks so much… I forgot about this method!

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Filipe Torres on February 21, 2013 at 8:38 am said:

Hi,
how to do this in Joomla 2.5?
Thanks.

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- Sean Redmond on February 24, 2013 at 11:47 am said:
  
  Looks like in 2.5, the equivalent of:
  
  $menu = JSite::getMenu();
  
  is:
  
  $menu = JFactory::getApplication()->getMenu();
  
  Reply ↓
James Barcellano (@ckeboss) on March 26, 2013 at 4:33 pm said:

Also, it looks like ->name has been replaced with ->title, at least in 3.0. Thanks for the info though 🙂

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Ralf Longwitz (@WDBurgdorf) on April 28, 2013 at 4:06 pm said:

This is what works for me in 3.1:

$menu = JFactory::getApplication()->getMenu();
$parent = $menu->getItem($menu->getActive()->parent_id)->title;

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