One of the most straightforward, dependable, and useful things in WordPress is what the Codex calls “Conditional Tags.” In her interview for Up and Running, Helen Hou-Sandí said WordPress conditional tags were her favorite WordPress functions for their simplicity and ease of use — they read just like English. We agree with her on that. They’re great. To explain them to you in more depth, we’re sharing a chapter of Up and Running here on WPShout. Let’s get to business understanding conditional tags in WordPress!

I’ve got a project that needs to treat WooCommerce category pages differently from its subcategory pages. Both use taxonomy-product_cat.php, though. What I’d really love to do is change just the search field in that template, depending on whether a particular page is showing a top-level category or a subcategory.