How to get taxonomy term of the current page and populate queries in the template

I’ve been stumbling around trying to figure out how to get a specific taxonomy term of the current page so that I can subsequently populate queries on the page for other post types that share the same term.

Basically:

• Page 1 has taxonomy term – education policy
• page.php has four parts:
  1. standard loop that outputs the page, but then has three subsequent queries
  2. loop for events that have taxonomy term – education policy
  3. loop for reports that have taxonomy term – education policy
  4. loop for people that have taxonomy term – education policy

I did page specific templates where I could just hardcode the term into the extra loops, but I need to figure out how to do it dynamically (what was originally supposed to be four or five pages is now forty or fifty).

I’ve found a few similar questions, but none that I could really find my way through implementing.

Get current page’s taxonomy
which was a little confusing to follow in terms of what was actually being asked.

Get the term id belonging to custom taxonomy on a custom single-post-type.php template page

I hope this makes sense and many thanks.

Hm, if you registered a taxonomy for the “page” object type correctly and then assigned a term of that taxonomy to a page… I believe you can then access the taxonomy and term slugs in the following way:

get_query_var( 'taxonomy' )
get_query_var( 'term' )

If you print_r($wp_query) you will see all the parameters that are there when generating a current page that’s displayed. With code above you’re accessing those parameters from $wp_query.

Then to get the term object with full info you can use get_term_by function, like so

$term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var('term'), get_query_var('taxonomy') );
echo $term->name;

This will print the “nice” name of the term.

I believe if you use get_query_var('term') or $term->slug (after getting the term object) you can use that slug in all of other queries.

Hope that helps. I never used taxonomy for pages.
Let me know how you get on.