Quick WP Tip: edit_term_link()

I’ve started optimizing tags, categories and custom taxonomies a lot more lately now that I can do all these neat things with them in my WordPress SEO plugin, and since I’m a busy guy I want to be able to do that quickly. So I wanted to edit my templates for those taxonomies to include an edit link. Looking through the WordPress source I could only find an edit_tag_link function, and I wanted it to work on custom taxonomies too. Turns out there’s nothing in core for that just yet.

Because I have to stay true to my own mentality expressed in another post: if you can fix it, do it, and submit a patch. So I made an edit_term_link function, created a patch and attached that to an already existing issue 9702 in the WordPress Trac that asked for something like that. We’ll see if it makes into core, I thought you might find it cool. My patch just got committed into core, so in WordPress 3.1, you’ll have edit_term_link and get_edit_term_link!

To be sure your site doesn’t die when you upgrade, I wrapped it in a if function_exists wrapper. You can just copy the code into your theme’s functions.php file, and then call edit_term_link() in your category, tag & taxonomy pages. Here’s the code:

if ( !function_exists('edit_term_link') ) {
  function edit_term_link( $link = '', $before = '', 
      $after = '', $term = null ) {
  
    if ( $term == null ) {
      global $wp_query;
      $term = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
    }
  
    $tax = get_taxonomy( $term->taxonomy );
    if ( !current_user_can($tax->cap->edit_terms) )
      return;

    if ( empty($link) )
      $link = __('Edit This');

    $link = '<a href="' . get_edit_tag_link( $term->term_id, 
        $term->taxonomy ) . '" title="' . $link . '">' . $link . '</a>';
    echo $before . 
       apply_filters( 'edit_term_link', $link, $term->term_id ) . $after;
  }
}