简单的wordpress查询类别

I've been consistently frustrated lately with wordpress and the conflicting methods. Coming back to a wordpress project after months of working with laravel is just such a pain in the toocus. That said can someone explain why this very simple query returns zilch?

$args = array(
  'type' => 'product',
  'parent' => 16
);

$cats = get_categories( $args );

If I var dump the above I get an empty array, ridiculous!

ref article: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_categories

Your args are incorrect - there is no supported type "product". The "type" argument supports only "post" and "link", and specifies the type of category to return. This should remain 'post' in 99% of the cases.

Perhaps you're trying to get product categories? In that case, this would be a different taxonomy, and therefore would require additional arguments or a different function. Can you please specify what exactly are you trying to pull from the database?

EDIT: use the following to get the child categories of a parent category with ID 16:

$cats = get_terms('product_cat', 'parent=16&hide_empty=0')