Related listings by parent categories

General HivePress
1

Hi HivePress community,

I’m looking to improve how “Related Listings” work on my site.

Currently, HivePress displays related listings based on the most specific (child) category of a listing. The problem is that in many cases, these subcategories contain very few listings (sometimes only one), which results in no related listings being shown at all.

What I would like to achieve instead:

  • If a listing belongs to a subcategory, the related listings should be pulled from its parent (main) category.

  • This way, even if the subcategory is small, users will still see relevant listings from the broader category.

Example:

  • Listing category: Cars → Classic Cars → 1980s

  • Current behavior: shows related only from “1980s” (often empty)

  • Desired behavior: show listings from “Classic Cars” (parent category)

My questions:

  1. Is there a built-in way in HivePress to change this behavior?

  2. If not, what would be the best way to override the related listings query?

  3. Has anyone implemented a fallback logic like:

    • try subcategory

    • if empty → use parent category

Any guidance or code examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

2

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5

Hi,

There’s no built-in feature for this at the moment, but if you’re familiar with coding, we can provide some guidance.

You can use the hivepress/v1/models/listing/relate hook to modify the related listings query. To get the parent categories, you can use the WordPress function get_ancestors. This should allow you to customize the related listings logic to include listings from parent categories as well.

Hope this helps